An integrated feature learning approach using deep learning for travel time prediction

Travel time data is a vital factor for numbers of performance measures in transportation systems. Travel time prediction is both a challenging and interesting problem in ITS, because of the underlying traffic and events' hidden patterns. In this study, we propose a multi-step deep-learning-based algorithm for predicting travel time. Our algorithm starts with data pre-processing. Then, the data is augmented by incorporating external datasets. Moreover, extensive feature learning and engineering such as spatiotemporal feature analysis, feature extraction, and clustering algorithms is applied to improve the feature space. Furthermore, for representing features we used a deep stacked autoencoder with dropout layer as regularizer. Finally, a deep multi-layer perceptron is trained to predict travel times. For testing our predictive accuracy, we used a 5-fold cross validation to test the generalization of our predictive model. As we observed, the performance of the proposed algorithm is on average 4 min better than applying the deep neural network to the initial feature space. Furthermore, we have noticed that representation learning using stacked autoencoders makes our learner robust to overfitting. Moreover, our algorithm is capable of capturing the general dynamics of the traffic, however further works need to be done for some rare events which impact travel time prediction significantly. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.