Short-Term Traffic Speed Forecasting Using a Deep Learning Method Based on Multitemporal Traffic Flow Volume

Accurate traffic speed forecasting not only can help traffic management departments make better judgments and improve the efficacy of road monitoring but also can help drivers plan their driving routes and arrive safely and smoothly at their destination. This paper focuses on the lack of traffic speed data and proposes a method for traffic speed forecasting based on the multitemporal traffic flow volume of the previous and later moment states. First, according to traffic flow volume data, the different traffic patterns of previous and later moment states were extracted. Second, the performance of five forecasting models, namely, long short-term memory (LSTM), backpropagation (BP), classification and regression trees, k-nearest neighbor, and support vector regression, were compared. Finally, the model with the best prediction results was used to conduct sensitivity analysis experiments for different traffic patterns. Through a real-data case study, we found that the LSTM model has the highest prediction accuracy compared to other models in both time and space. This traffic pattern “previous = 3 and later = 3” can forecast traffic speed more accurately, and its forecasting ability is robust across a range of scenarios.