Building trust for traffic flow forecasting components in intelligent transportation systems via interpretable ensemble learning

Traffic flow forecasting constitutes a crucial component of intelligent transportation systems(ITSs).Numerous studies have been conducted for traffic flow forecasting during the past decades.However,most existing studies have concentrated on developing advanced algorithms or models to attain state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy.For real-world ITS applications,the interpretability of the developed models is extremely important but has largely been ignored.This study presents an interpretable traffic flow forecasting framework based on popular tree-ensemble algorithms.The framework comprises multiple key components integrated into a highly flexible and customizable multi-stage pipeline,enabling the seamless incorporation of various algorithms and tools.To evaluate the effectiveness of the framework,the developed tree-ensemble models and another three typical categories of baseline models,including statistical time series,shallow learning,and deep learning,were compared on three datasets collected from different types of roads(i.e.,arterial,expressway,and freeway).Further,the study delves into an in-depth interpretability analysis of the most competitive tree-ensemble models using six categories of interpretable machine learning methods.Experimental results highlight the potential of the proposed framework.The tree-ensemble models developed within this framework achieve competitive accuracy while maintaining high inference efficiency similar to statistical time series and shallow learning models.Meanwhile,these tree-ensemble models offer interpretability from multiple perspectives via interpretable machine-learning techniques.The proposed framework is anticipated to provide reliable and trustworthy decision support across various ITS applications.

Railway Passenger Flow Forecasting by Integrating Passenger Flow Relationship and Spatiotemporal Similarity

Railway passenger flow forecasting can help to develop sensible railway schedules,make full use of railway resources,and meet the travel demand of passengers.The structure of passenger flow in railway networks and the spatiotemporal relationship of passenger flow among stations are two distinctive features of railway passenger flow.Most of the previous studies used only a single feature for prediction and lacked correlations,resulting in suboptimal performance.To address the above-mentioned problem,we proposed the railway passenger flow prediction model called Flow-Similarity Attention Graph Convolutional Network(F-SAGCN).First,we constructed the passenger flow relations graph(RG)based on the Origin-Destination(OD).Second,the Passenger Flow Fluctuation Similarity(PFFS)algorithm is used to measure the similarity of passenger flow between stations,which helps construct the spatiotemporal similarity graph(SG).Then,we determine the weights of the mutual influence of different stations at different times through an attention mechanism and extract spatiotemporal features through graph convolution on the RG and SG.Finally,we fused the spatiotemporal features and the original temporal features of stations for prediction.The comparison experiments on a railway bureau’s accurate railway passenger flow data show that the proposed F-SAGCN method improved the prediction accuracy and reduced the mean absolute percentage error(MAPE)of 46 stations to 7.93%.

Hourly traffic flow forecasting using a new hybrid modelling method

Short-term traffic flow forecasting is a significant part of intelligent transportation system.In some traffic control scenarios,obtaining future traffic flow in advance is conducive to highway management department to have sufficient time to formulate corresponding traffic flow control measures.In hence,it is meaningful to establish an accurate short-term traffic flow method and provide reference for peak traffic flow warning.This paper proposed a new hybrid model for traffic flow forecasting,which is composed of the variational mode decomposition(VMD)method,the group method of data handling(GMDH)neural network,bi-directional long and short term memory(BILSTM)network and ELMAN network,and is optimized by the imperialist competitive algorithm(ICA)method.To illustrate the performance of the proposed model,there are several comparative experiments between the proposed model and other models.The experiment results show that 1)BILSTM network,GMDH network and ELMAN network have better predictive performance than other single models;2)VMD can significantly improve the predictive performance of the ICA-GMDH-BILSTM-ELMAN model.The effect of VMD method is better than that of EEMD method and FEEMD method.To conclude,the proposed model which is made up of the VMD method,the ICA method,the BILSTM network,the GMDH network and the ELMAN network has excellent predictive ability for traffic flow series.

Research on traffic flow forecasting model based on cusp catastrophe theory

This paper intends to describe the relationship between traffic parameters by using cusp catastrophe theory and to deduce highway capacity and corresponding speed forecasting value through suitable transformation of catastrophe model. The five properties of a catastrophe system are outlined briefly, and then the data collected on freeways of Zhujiang River Delta, Guangdong province, China are examined to ascertain whether they exhibit qualitative properties and attributes of the catastrophe model. The forecasting value of speed and capacity for freeway segments are given based on the catastrophe model. Furthermore, speed-flow curve on freeway is drawn by plotting out congested and uncongested traffic flow and the capacity value for the same freeway segment is also obtained from speed-flow curve to test the feasibility of the application of cusp catastrophe theory in traffic flow analysis. The calculating results of catastrophe model coincide with those of traditional traffic flow models regressed from field observed data, which indicates that the deficiency of traditional analysis of relationship between speed, flow and occupancy in two-dimension can be compensated by analysis of the relationship among speed, flow and occupancy based on catastrophe model in three-dimension. Finally, the prospects and problems of its application in traffic flow research in China are discussed.

A Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting Method Based on a Three-Layer K-Nearest Neighbor Non-Parametric Regression Algorithm

Short-term traffic flow is one of the core technologies to realize traffic flow guidance. In this article, in view of the characteristics that the traffic flow changes repeatedly, a short-term traffic flow forecasting method based on a three-layer K-nearest neighbor non-parametric regression algorithm is proposed. Specifically, two screening layers based on shape similarity were introduced in K-nearest neighbor non-parametric regression method, and the forecasting results were output using the weighted averaging on the reciprocal values of the shape similarity distances and the most-similar-point distance adjustment method. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm has improved the predictive ability of the traditional K-nearest neighbor non-parametric regression method, and greatly enhanced the accuracy and real-time performance of short-term traffic flow forecasting.

Applicability of Galway River Flow Forecasting and Modeling System (GFFMS) for Lake Tana Basin, Ethiopia

Flow forecasting is used in activities requiring stream flow data such as irrigation development, water supply, and flood control and hydropower development. Real time flow forecasting with special interest to flooding is one of the most important applications of hydrology for decision making in water resources. In order to meet flood and flow forecasts using hydrological models may be used and subsequently be updated in accordance with residuals. Therefore in this study, different flood forecasting methods are evaluated for their potential of stream flow forecasting using Galway River Flow Forecasting and Modeling System (GFFMS) in Lake Tana basin, upper Blue Nile basin, Ethiopia. The areal rainfall and temperature data was used for the model input. Three forecast updating methods, i.e., autoregressive (AR), linear transfer function (LTF) and neuron network updating (NNU) methods were compared for stream flow forecasting, at one to six days lead time. The most sensitive parameters were fine-tuned first and modeled for a calibration period of 1994-2004 for three selected watersheds of the Tana basin. The results indicate that with the exception of the simple linear model, an acceptable result could be obtained using models embedded in the software. Artificial neural network model performed well for Gilgel Abay (NSE = 0.87) and Gumara (NSE = 0.9) watersheds but for Megech watershed, SMAR model (NSE = 0.78) gave a better forecast result. In capturing the peak flows LTF and NNU in forecast updating mode performed better for Gilgel Abay and Megech watersheds, respectively. The results of this study implied that GFFMS can be used as a useful tool to forecast peak stream flows for flood early warning in the upper Blue Nile basin.

Power flow forecasts at transmission grid nodes using Graph Neural Networks

The increasing share of renewable energy in the electricity grid and progressing changes in power consumption have led to fluctuating,and weather-dependent power flows.To ensure grid stability,grid operators rely on power forecasts which are crucial for grid calculations and planning.In this paper,a Multi-Task Learning approach is combined with a Graph Neural Network(GNN)to predict vertical power flows at transformers connecting high and extra-high voltage levels.The proposed method accounts for local differences in power flow characteristics by using an Embedding Multi-Task Learning approach.The use of a Bayesian embedding to capture the latent node characteristics allows to share the weights across all transformers in the subsequent node-invariant GNN while still allowing the individual behavioral patterns of the transformers to be distinguished.At the same time,dependencies between transformers are considered by the GNN architecture which can learn relationships between different transformers and thus take into account that power flows in an electricity network are not independent from each other.The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through evaluation on two real-world data sets provided by two of four German Transmission System Operators,comprising large portions of the operated German transmission grid.The results show that the proposed Multi-Task Graph Neural Network is a suitable representation learner for electricity networks with a clear advantage provided by the preceding embedding layer.It is able to capture interconnections between correlated transformers and indeed improves the performance in power flow prediction compared to standard Neural Networks.A sign test shows that the proposed model reduces the test RMSE on both data sets compared to the benchmark models significantly.

A Model of Debris Flow Forecast Based on the Water-Soil Coupling Mechanism

Debris flow forecast is an important means of disaster mitigation. However, the accuracy of the statistics-based debris flow forecast is unsatisfied while the mechanism-based forecast is unavailable at the watershed scale because most of existing researches on the initiation mechanism of debris flow took a single slope as the main object. In order to solve this problem, this paper developed a model of debris flow forecast based on the water-soil coupling mechanism at the watershed scale. In this model, the runoff and the instable soil caused by the rainfall in a watershed is estimated by the distrib- uted hydrological model （GBHM） and an instable identification model of the unsaturated soil. Because the debris flow is a special fluid composed of soil and water and has a bigger density, the density esti- mated by the runoff and instable soil mass in a watershed under the action of a rainfall is employed as a key factor to identify the formation probability of debris flow in the forecast model. The Jiangjia Gulley, a typical debris flow valley with a several debris flow events each year, is selected as a case study watershed to test this forecast model of debris flow. According the observation data of Dongchuan Debris Flow Observation and Research Station, CAS located in Jiangjia Gulley, there were 4 debris flow events in 2006. The test results show that the accuracy of the model is satisfied.

Improved Social Emotion Optimization Algorithm for Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting Based on Back-Propagation Neural Network

The back-propagation neural network(BPNN) is a well-known multi-layer feed-forward neural network which is trained by the error reverse propagation algorithm. It is very suitable for the complex of short-term traffic flow forecasting; however, BPNN is easy to fall into local optimum and slow convergence. In order to overcome these deficiencies, a new approach called social emotion optimization algorithm(SEOA) is proposed in this paper to optimize the linked weights and thresholds of BPNN. Each individual in SEOA represents a BPNN. The availability of the proposed forecasting models is proved with the actual traffic flow data of the 2 nd Ring Road of Beijing. Experiment of results show that the forecasting accuracy of SEOA is improved obviously as compared with the accuracy of particle swarm optimization back-propagation(PSOBP) and simulated annealing particle swarm optimization back-propagation(SAPSOBP) models. Furthermore, since SEOA does not respond to the negative feedback information, Metropolis rule is proposed to give consideration to both positive and negative feedback information and diversify the adjustment methods. The modified BPNN model, in comparison with social emotion optimization back-propagation(SEOBP) model, is more advantageous to search the global optimal solution. The accuracy of Metropolis rule social emotion optimization back-propagation(MRSEOBP) model is improved about 19.54% as compared with that of SEOBP model in predicting the dramatically changing data.

Combination forecast for urban rail transit passenger flow based on fuzzy information granulation and CPSO-LS-SVM

In order to obtain the trend of urban rail transit traffic flow and grasp the fluctuation range of passenger flow better,this paper proposes a combined forecasting model of passenger flow fluctuation range based on fuzzy information granulation and least squares support vector machine(LS-SVM)optimized by chaos particle swarm optimization(CPSO).Due to the nonlinearity and fluctuation of the passenger flow,firstly,fuzzy information granulation is used to extract the valid data from the window according to the requirement.Secondly,CPSO that has strong global search ability is applied to optimize the parameters of the LS-SVM forecasting model.Finally,the combined model is used to forecast the fluctuation range of early peak passenger flow at Tiyu Xilu Station of Guangzhou Metro Line 3 in 2014,and the results are compared and analyzed with other models.Simulation results demonstrate that the combined forecasting model can effectively track the fluctuation of passenger flow,which provides an effective method for predicting the fluctuation range of short-term passenger flow in the future.

Short-term traffic flow online forecasting based on kernel adaptive filter

Considering that the prediction accuracy of the traditional traffic flow forecasting model is low,based on kernel adaptive filter(KAF)algorithm,kernel least mean square(KLMS)algorithm and fixed-budget kernel recursive least-square(FB-KRLS)algorithm are presented for online adaptive prediction.The computational complexity of the KLMS algorithm is low and does not require additional solution paradigm constraints,but its regularization process can solve the problem of regularization performance degradation in high-dimensional data processing.To reduce the computational complexity,the sparse criterion is introduced into the KLMS algorithm.To further improve forecasting accuracy,FB-KRLS algorithm is proposed.It is an online learning method with fixed memory budget,and it is capable of recursively learning a nonlinear mapping and changing over time.In contrast to a previous approximate linear dependence(ALD)based technique,the purpose of the presented algorithm is not to prune the oldest data point in every time instant but it aims to prune the least significant data point,thus suppressing the growth of kernel matrix.In order to verify the validity of the proposed methods,they are applied to one-step and multi-step predictions of traffic flow in Beijing.Under the same conditions,they are compared with online adaptive ALD-KRLS method and other kernel learning methods.Experimental results show that the proposed KAF algorithms can improve the prediction accuracy,and its online learning ability meets the actual requirements of traffic flow and contributes to real-time online forecasting of traffic flow.

Multi-Layer Forecast Project of Rain-Induced Debris Flow

Based on four kinds of methods—numerical weather prediction model, cloud image of stationary meteorological satellite, echo image of meteorological radar and telemetric rain gauge, multi space-time scale precipitation prediction products have been achieved, and multi-layer project of debris flow forecast is established with different space-time scale to get different forecast precision. The forecast system has the advantages in combination of regions and ravines, rational compounding of time and space scale. The project, which has debris flow forecast models of Sichuan province, Liangshan district and single ravine, can forecast debris flow in 3 layers and meets the demand of hazard mitigation in corresponding layer.

Flow Direction Level Traffic Flow Prediction Based on a GCN-LSTM Combined Model

Traffic flow prediction plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems and is of great significance in the applications of traffic control and urban planning.Due to the complexity of road traffic flow data,traffic flow prediction has been one of the challenging tasks to fully exploit the spatiotemporal characteristics of roads to improve prediction accuracy.In this study,a combined flow direction level traffic flow prediction graph convolutional network(GCN)and long short-term memory(LSTM)model based on spatiotemporal characteristics is proposed.First,a GCN model is employed to capture the topological structure of the data graph and extract the spatial features of road networks.Additionally,due to the capability to handle long-term dependencies,the longterm memory is used to predict the time series of traffic flow and extract the time features.The proposed model is evaluated using real-world data,which are obtained from the intersection of Liuquan Road and Zhongrun Avenue in the Zibo High-Tech Zone of China.The results show that the developed combined GCNLSTM flow direction level traffic flow prediction model can perform better than the single models of the LSTM model and GCN model,and the combined ARIMA-LSTM model in traffic flow has a strong spatiotemporal correlation.

Hybrid Model for Short-Term Passenger Flow Prediction in Rail Transit

A precise and timely forecast of short-term rail transit passenger flow provides data support for traffic management and operation,assisting rail operators in efficiently allocating resources and timely relieving pressure on passenger safety and operation.First,the passenger flow sequence models in the study are broken down using VMD for noise reduction.The objective environment features are then added to the characteristic factors that affect the passenger flow.The target station serves as an additional spatial feature and is mined concurrently using the KNN algorithm.It is shown that the hybrid model VMD-CLSMT has a higher prediction accuracy,by setting BP,CNN,and LSTM reference experiments.All models’second order prediction effects are superior to their first order effects,showing that the residual network can significantly raise model prediction accuracy.Additionally,it confirms the efficacy of supplementary and objective environmental features.

Medium-term forecast of daily passenger volume of high speed railway based on DLP-WNNMedium-term forecast of dailypassenger volume of high speedrailway based on DLP-WNN

Purpose – This paper aims to propose a medium-term forecast model for the daily passenger volume of HighSpeed Railway (HSR) systems to predict the daily the Origin-Destination (OD) daily volume formultiple consecutivedays (e.g. 120 days).Design/methodology/approach – By analyzing the characteristics of the historical data on daily passengervolume of HSR systems, the date and holiday labels were designed with determined value ranges.In accordance to the autoregressive characteristics of the daily passenger volume of HSR, the Double LayerParallel Wavelet Neural Network (DLP-WNN) model suitable for the medium-term (about 120 d) forecast of thedaily passenger volume of HSR was established. The DLP-WNN model obtains the daily forecast result byweighed summation of the daily output values of the two subnets. Subnet 1 reflects the overall trend of dailypassenger volumes in the recent period, and subnet 2 the daily fluctuation of the daily passenger volume toensure the accuracy of medium-term forecast.Findings – According to the example application, in which the DLP-WNN modelwas used for the medium-termforecast of the daily passenger volumes for 120 days for typical O-D pairs at 4 different distances, the averageabsolute percentage error is 7%-12%, obviously lower than the results measured by the Back Propagation (BP)neural network, the ELM (extreme learning machine), the ELMAN neural network, the GRNN (generalizedregression neural network) and the VMD-GA-BP. The DLP-WNN model was verified to be suitable for themedium-term forecast of the daily passenger volume of HSR.Originality/value – This study proposed a Double Layer Parallel structure forecast model for medium-termdaily passenger volume (about 120 days) of HSR systems by using the date and holiday labels and WaveletNeural Network. The predict results are important input data for supporting the line planning, scheduling andother decisions in operation and management in HSR systems.

The study on Sanmenxia annual flow forecasting in the Yellow River with mix regression model

This paper established mix regression model for simulating annual flow, in which annual runoff is auto-regression factor, precipitation, air temperature and water consumption are regression factors; we adopted 9 hypothesis climate change schemes to forecast the change of annual flow of Sanmenxia Station. The results show : (1) When temperature is steady, the average annual runoff will increase by 8.3% if precipitation increases by 10%; when precipitation decreases by 10%, the average annual runoff will decrease by 8.2%; when precipitation is steady, the average annual runoff will decrease by 2.4% if temperature increases 1℃; if temperature decreases 1℃, runoff will increase by 1.2%. The mix regression model can well simulate annual runoff. (2) As to 9 different temperature and precipitation scenarios, scenario 9 is the most adverse to the runoff of Sanmenxia Station of Yellow River; i.e. temperature increases 1℃ and precipitation decreases by 10%. Under this condition, the simulated average annual runoff decreases by 10.8%. On the contrary, scenario 1 is the best to the enhancement of runoff; i.e. when temperature decreases 1 ℃ precipitation will increase by 10%, which will make the annual runoff of Sanmenxia increase by 10.6%.

Expressway traffic flow prediction using chaos cloud particle swarm algorithm and PPPR model

Aiming at the real-time fluctuation and nonlinear characteristics of the expressway short-term traffic flow forecasting the parameter projection pursuit regression PPPR model is applied to forecast the expressway traffic flow where the orthogonal Hermite polynomial is used to fit the ridge functions and the least square method is employed to determine the polynomial weight coefficient c.In order to efficiently optimize the projection direction a and the number M of ridge functions of the PPPR model the chaos cloud particle swarm optimization CCPSO algorithm is applied to optimize the parameters. The CCPSO-PPPR hybrid optimization model for expressway short-term traffic flow forecasting is established in which the CCPSO algorithm is used to optimize the optimal projection direction a in the inner layer while the number M of ridge functions is optimized in the outer layer.Traffic volume weather factors and travel date of the previous several time intervals of the road section are taken as the input influencing factors. Example forecasting and model comparison results indicate that the proposed model can obtain a better forecasting effect and its absolute error is controlled within [-6,6] which can meet the application requirements of expressway traffic flow forecasting.

基于ASTLSTM的地铁乘客流量短时预测

地铁乘客流量预测是智能交通系统的重要环节,当前大多数预测模型较少对地铁乘客流量进行时空相关性建模,且未考虑空气质量等天气因素带来的影响,存在地铁乘客流量预测准确度不高的问题。针对以上问题,提出基于注意力机制的时空长短期记忆(ASTLSTM)网络的地铁乘客流量短时预测模型。首先,对数据进行预处理;然后,利用注意力机制与图卷积网络(GCN)、卷积神经网络(CNN)相融合,挖掘地铁数据中的时空相关性,并通过长短期记忆网络(LSTM)来提取空气质量数据中的外部特征;最后,通过特征融合得到地铁乘客流量预测结果。实验结果表明,ASTLSTM模型与LSTM、Conv LSTM等典型模型相比,在短期的地铁乘客流量预测上都有较高的准确度。

基于ARIMAX的区域飞行流量预测模型研究

随着航空业的迅速发展,航空公司、机场管理和空中交通管制对精确预测飞行流量的需求迅速增加,为此提出了基于自回归移动平均外生变量(ARIMAX)的区域飞行流量预测模型。通过分析广播式自动相关监视(ADS-B)数据,在自回归移动平均模型(ARIMA)的基础上引入航空器飞行距离间隔作为外生变量构建预测模型,将ARIMAX与LSTM、ARIMA的预测结果进行均方根误差(RMSE)及平均绝对百分比误差(MAPE)比较,由实验结果可知,该模型预测结果的RMSE及MAPE较LSTM分别降低了21.3架及1.2%,较ARIMA分别降低了29.9架及2.4%。