Spatio-Temporal Partitioning of Large Urban Networks for Travel Time Prediction

The paper explores the potential of spatiotemporal network partitioning for travel time prediction accuracy and computational costs in the context of large-scale urban road networks (including motorways/freeways, arterials and urban streets). Forecasting in this context is challenging due to the complexity, heterogeneity, noisy data, unexpected events and the size of the traffic network. The proposed spatio-temporal network partitioning methodology is versatile, and can be applied for any source of travel time data and multivariate travel time prediction method. A case study of Stockholm, Sweden considers a network exceeding 11,000 links and uses taxi probe data as the source of travel times data. To predict the travel times the Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PPCA) is used. Results show that the spatio-temporal network partitioning provides a more appropriate bias-variance tradeoff, and that prediction accuracy and computational costs are improved by considering the proper number of clusters towards robust large-scale travel time prediction.