Online Estimation and Prediction of Large-Scale Network Traffic From Sparse Probe Vehicle Data

Network traffic prediction based on probe vehicle data is important for traffic management and route recommendation and has been intensively studied. Previous traffic prediction methods mainly focused on recurring traffic congestion. Predicting non-recurring traffic congestion, caused by events and accidents, is significantly more important; however, it has not been intensively studied. To predict non-recurring traffic congestion using probe data, we need to estimate the current traffic conditions based on sparse observations for large traffic networks to track traffic changes online. Conventional traffic forecasting methods have not been able to solve all of these problems. To address these problems, we propose a data assimilation method using a state space neural network (SSNN) with an incorporated topology of road networks. The SSNN model can easily model network traffic and can easily estimate its states and parameters by data assimilation using Bayesian filtering. In this study, we adopted a decoupled extended Kalman filter (DEKF) based data assimilation, which is scalable and applicable to large-scale network traffic, to estimate the states and parameters online. We evaluate the proposed method using an open dataset that includes a road network comprising over 30000 road segments. The results show that our method achieves higher prediction accuracy for predicting unknown traffic congestion and is more robust against data sparsity than conventional state estimation methods.

Automated summary

This study proposes a data assimilation method using a state space neural network for predicting non-recurring traffic congestion. The results show that the method achieves higher prediction accuracy for predicting unknown traffic congestion and is more robust against data sparsity.