Forecasting urban traffic flow by SVR with continuous ACO

Accurate forecasting of inter-urban traffic flow has been one of the most important issues globally in the research on road traffic congestion. Because the information of inter-urban traffic presents a challenging situation, the traffic flow forecasting involves a rather complex nonlinear data pattern. In the recent years, the support vector regression model (SVR) has been widely used to solve nonlinear regression and time series problems. This investigation presents a short-term traffic forecasting model which combines the support vector regression model with continuous ant colony optimization algorithms (SVRCACO) to forecast inter-urban traffic flow. Additionally, a numerical example of traffic flow values from northern Taiwan is employed to elucidate the forecasting performance of the proposed SVRCACO model. The forecasting results indicate that the proposed model yields more accurate forecasting results than the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) time series model. Therefore, the SVRCACO model is a promising alternative for forecasting traffic flow. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.