Expressway Exit Station Short-Term Traffic Flow Prediction With Split Traffic Flows According Originating Entry Stations

As an essential component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), short-term traffic flow prediction is a key step to anticipate traffic congestion. Due to the availability of massive traffic data, data-driven methods with a variety of features have been applied widely to improve the traffic flow prediction. China has the longest total length of expressways in the world and there is significant information recorded when vehicles enter and exit the expressway. In this paper, we collect data at an expressway exit station in Shanghai, split the data according to its originating entry stations and predict the corresponding exit station traffic flow using the multi split traffic flows. First, the original records are collected, preprocessed, split, aggregated and normalized. Second, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model is applied to learn from the features of the overall flow and split traffic flows to predict the overall exit flow. The baselines are models which only overall flow information is considered. Compared with the baselines, in other models, the split flows according entry stations are also considered for prediction. Finally, the LSTM model is made comparison with the Convolutional LSTM(ConvLSTM), the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) model and the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model. When the information of overall flow and 6 split traffic flows is used and step is set to 11 (with 5 minute aggregation), the model prediction performs best. Compared with the best result of LSTM baseline model, the improvement of prediction accuracy is up to 5.48 percent by Mean Absolute Error (MAE).