Efficient Journey Planning and Congestion Prediction Through Deep Learning

The advancements of technology continuously rising over the years has seen many applications that are useful in providing users with sufficient information to make better journey plans on their own. However, commuters still find themselves going through congested routes every day to get to their destinations. This paper attempts to delineate the possibilities of improving urban mobility through big data processing and deep-learning models. Essentially, through a predictive model to predict congestion and its duration, this paper aims to develop and validate a functional journey planning mobile application that can predict traffic conditions, allowing road users to make better informed decisions to their travel plans. This paper proposes a Multi-Layered Perceptron (MLP) deep learning model for congestion prediction and supplements a Linear Regression (LR) model to predict its duration. The proposed MLP-LR model performed reasonably well with an accuracy of 63% in predicting an occurrence of congestion. Some critical discussions on further research opportunities stemming from this study is also presented

Two to Tangle: Financial Development, Political Instability and Economic Growth in Argentina (1896–2000)

This paper investigates the effects of financial development and political instability on economic growth in a power-ARCH framework with data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. Our findings suggest that (i) informal or unanticipated political instability (e.g., guerrilla warfare) has a direct negative impact on growth; (ii) formal or anticipated instability (e.g., cabinet changes) has an indirect (through volatility) impact on growth; (iii) the effect of financial development is positive and, surprisingly, not via volatility; (iv) the informal instability effects are much larger in the short- than in the long-run; and (v) the impact of financial development on economic growth is negative in the short- but positive in the long-run.economic growth, financial development, volatility, political instability, power-ARCH