Traffic congestion anomaly detection and prediction using deep learning

Congestion prediction represents a major priority for traffic management centres around the world to ensure timely incident response handling. The increasing amounts of generated traffic data have been used to train machine learning predictors for traffic, however, this is a challenging task due to inter-dependencies of traffic flow both in time and space. Recently, deep learning techniques have shown significant prediction improvements over traditional models, however, open questions remain around their applicability, accuracy and parameter tuning. This paper brings two contributions in terms of: 1) applying an outlier detection an anomaly adjustment method based on incoming and historical data streams, and 2) proposing an advanced deep learning framework for simultaneously predicting the traffic flow, speed and occupancy on a large number of monitoring stations along a highly circulated motorway in Sydney, Australia, including exit and entry loop count stations, and over varying training and prediction time horizons. The spatial and temporal features extracted from the 36.34 million data points are used in various deep learning architectures that exploit their spatial structure (convolutional neuronal networks), their temporal dynamics (recurrent neuronal networks), or both through a hybrid spatio-temporal modelling (CNN-LSTM). We show that our deep learning models consistently outperform traditional methods, and we conduct a comparative analysis of the optimal time horizon of historical data required to predict traffic flow at different time points in the future. Lastly, we prove that the anomaly adjustment method brings significant improvements to using deep learning in both time and space

Traffic incident duration prediction via a deep learning framework for text description encoding

Predicting the traffic incident duration is a hard problem to solve due to the stochastic nature of incident occurrence in space and time, a lack of information at the beginning of a reported traffic disruption, and lack of advanced methods in transport engineering to derive insights from past accidents. This paper proposes a new fusion framework for predicting the incident duration from limited information by using an integration of machine learning with traffic flow/speed and incident description as features, encoded via several Deep Learning methods (ANN autoencoder and character-level LSTM-ANN sentiment classifier). The paper constructs a cross-disciplinary modelling approach in transport and data science. The approach improves the incident duration prediction accuracy over the top-performing ML models applied to baseline incident reports. Results show that our proposed method can improve the accuracy by $60\%$ when compared to standard linear or support vector regression models, and a further $7\%$ improvement with respect to the hybrid deep learning auto-encoded GBDT model which seems to outperform all other models. The application area is the city of San Francisco, rich in both traffic incident logs (Countrywide Traffic Accident Data set) and past historical traffic congestion information (5-minute precision measurements from Caltrans Performance Measurement System)