In order to analyze the heterogeneity in vehicular traffic speed, a new method that integrates cluster analysis and probability distribution function fitting is presented. First, for identifying the optimal number of ...In order to analyze the heterogeneity in vehicular traffic speed, a new method that integrates cluster analysis and probability distribution function fitting is presented. First, for identifying the optimal number of clusters, the two-step cluster method is applied to analyze actual speed data, which suggests that dividing speed data into two clusters can best reflect the intrinsic patterns of traffic flows. Such information is then taken as guidance in probability distribution function fitting. The normal, skew-normal and skew-t distribution functions are used to fit the probability distribution of each cluster respectively, which suggests that the skew-t distribution has the highest fitting accuracy; the second is skew-normal distribution; the worst is normal distribution. Model analysis results demonstrate that the proposed mixture model has a better fitting and generalization capability than the conventional single model. In addition, the new method is more flexible in terms of data fitting and can provide a more accurate model of speed distribution.展开更多
基金The National Science Foundation by Changjiang Scholarship of Ministry of Education of China(No.BCS-0527508)the Joint Research Fund for Overseas Natural Science of China(No.51250110075)+1 种基金the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(No.BK200910046)the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(No.0901005C)
文摘In order to analyze the heterogeneity in vehicular traffic speed, a new method that integrates cluster analysis and probability distribution function fitting is presented. First, for identifying the optimal number of clusters, the two-step cluster method is applied to analyze actual speed data, which suggests that dividing speed data into two clusters can best reflect the intrinsic patterns of traffic flows. Such information is then taken as guidance in probability distribution function fitting. The normal, skew-normal and skew-t distribution functions are used to fit the probability distribution of each cluster respectively, which suggests that the skew-t distribution has the highest fitting accuracy; the second is skew-normal distribution; the worst is normal distribution. Model analysis results demonstrate that the proposed mixture model has a better fitting and generalization capability than the conventional single model. In addition, the new method is more flexible in terms of data fitting and can provide a more accurate model of speed distribution.
