Predicting Traffic Conditions Using Knowledge-Growing Bayes Classifier

Congestion often hinders human mobility. This problem occurs due to the constant increase in vehicles every year. Reliable predictions of traffic conditions would allow drivers to choose their routes to avoid traffic jams while providing the police with traffic management strategies. Therefore, this paper tests the ability of various machine learning methods to predict traffic conditions. The study assesses Neural Networks, Bayes Classifier, Decision Trees, SVM, Deep Neural Network, and Deep Learning. Of these methods, the Decision Tree, Deep Neural Network, and Bayes Classifier show the highest performance in predicting traffic conditions using static data testing. However, in dynamic testing to assess the growth of knowledge, the performance of the Knowledge-Growing Decision Tree tends to decrease as the training data grows. Its performance decreased 3.89 points (88.24% to 84.35%) in accuracy, and 7.55 points (76.25% to 68.70%) for each precision, recall, and F1 Score. Conversely, the Knowledge-Growing Deep Neural Network and Bayes Classifier had a better performance than Decision Tree. The performances of Knowledge-Growing Deep Neural Network increased slightly by 0.35 points (93.38% to 93.73%) for accuracy and 0.69 points (86.77% to 87.64%) in other measurements. Although its performance increased, the processing time takes very long, namely 139452.76 seconds and 318832.80 seconds for sub-scheme (a) and (b), respectively. Meanwhile, the Knowledge-Growing Bayes Classifier offers a greater performance increase of 2.3 points (80.52% to 82.82%) for the accuracy and 4.6 points (65.63% to 61.03%) for the other performance measurements. In addition, it also scored better for processing time, as predictions only take 3 seconds using sub-scheme (a), and 7 seconds when using sub-scheme (b). Therefore, the paper proposes the Knowledge-Growing Bayes Classifier to predict rapidly changing traffic conditions. This method outperform the others. These can be attributed to its ability to 1) adjust to ever-changing the traffic conditions; 2) predict the result as soon as the data are acquired; and 3) make decentralized predictions.