Due to the increasing traffic volume in metropolitan areas, short-term travel time prediction (TTP) can be an important and useful tool for both travelers and traffic management. Accurate and reliable short-term travel time prediction can greatly help vehicle routing and congestion mitigation. One of the most challenging tasks in TTP is developing and selecting the most appropriate prediction algorithm using the available data. In this study, the travel time data was provided and collected from the Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS). Then, the travel times were predicted for short horizons (ranging from 15 to 60 min) on the selected freeway corridors by applying four different machine learning algorithms, which are Decision Trees (DT), Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Long Short-Term Memory neural network (LSTM). Many spatial and temporal characteristics that may affect travel time were used when developing the models. The performance of prediction accuracy and reliability are compared. Numerical results suggest that RF can achieve a better prediction performance result than any of the other methods not only in accuracy but also with stability.
Purpose Metropolitan areas suffer from frequent road traffic congestion not only during peak hours but also during off-peak periods. Different machine learning methods have been used in travel time prediction, however, such machine learning methods practically face the problem of overfitting. Tree-based ensembles have been applied in various prediction fields, and such approaches usually produce high prediction accuracy by aggregating and averaging individual decision trees. The inherent advantages of these approaches not only get better prediction results but also have a good bias-variance trade-off which can help to avoid overfitting. However, the reality is that the application of tree-based integration algorithms in traffic prediction is still limited. This study aims to improve the accuracy and interpretability of the models by using random forest (RF) to analyze and model the travel time on freeways. Design/methodology/approach As the traffic conditions often greatly change, the prediction results are often unsatisfactory. To improve the accuracy of short-term travel time prediction in the freeway network, a practically feasible and computationally efficient RF prediction method for real-world freeways by using probe traffic data was generated. In addition, the variables’ relative importance was ranked, which provides an investigation platform to gain a better understanding of how different contributing factors might affect travel time on freeways. Findings The parameters of the RF model were estimated by using the training sample set. After the parameter tuning process was completed, the proposed RF model was developed. The features’ relative importance showed that the variables (travel time 15 min before) and time of day (TOD) contribute the most to the predicted travel time result. The model performance was also evaluated and compared against the extreme gradient boosting method and the results indicated that the RF always produces more accurate travel time predictions. Originality/value This research developed an RF method to predict the freeway travel time by using the probe vehicle-based traffic data and weather data. Detailed information about the input variables and data pre-processing were presented. To measure the effectiveness of proposed travel time prediction algorithms, the mean absolute percentage errors were computed for different observation segments combined with different prediction horizons ranging from 15 to 60 min.
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