Effective management of urban traffic is important for any smart city
initiative. Therefore, the quality of the sensory traffic data is of paramount
importance. However, like any sensory data, urban traffic data are prone to
imperfections leading to missing measurements. In this paper, we focus on
inter-region traffic data completion. We model the inter-region traffic as a
spatiotemporal tensor that suffers from missing measurements. To recover the
missing data, we propose an enhanced CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) completion approach
that considers the urban and temporal aspects of the traffic. To derive the
urban characteristics, we divide the area of study into regions. Then, for each
region, we compute urban feature vectors inspired from biodiversity which are
used to compute the urban similarity matrix. To mine the temporal aspect, we
first conduct an entropy analysis to determine the most regular time-series.
Then, we conduct a joint Fourier and correlation analysis to compute its
periodicity and construct the temporal matrix. Both urban and temporal matrices
are fed into a modified CP-completion objective function. To solve this
objective, we propose an alternating least square approach that operates on the
vectorized version of the inputs. We conduct comprehensive comparative study
with two evaluation scenarios. In the first one, we simulate random missing
values. In the second scenario, we simulate missing values at a given area and
time duration. Our results demonstrate that our approach provides effective
recovering performance reaching 26% improvement compared to state-of-art CP
approaches and 35% compared to state-of-art generative model-based approaches