Performance analysis of machine learning methods for short-term traffic prediction

Abstract

With the rapid development of urbanization and the rapid increase of the number of motor vehicles, the problem of urban traffic congestion has become increasingly prominent. The accurate prediction of short-term traffic flow is considered as a promising solution, which can provide a key decision-making basis for route planning and traffic flow scheduling, so that can greatly alleviate or even prevent congestion. Researchers have used many machine learning methods to predict traffic flow, but few people pay attention to the boundaries of different machine algorithms. In this paper, we use AdaBoost, Random Forest, SVM and BP neural network to predict short-term traffic flow in California, which aims to compare the differences in prediction performance of different algorithms and analyze their potential reasons. The results show that, the integration methods such as AdaBoost and Random Forest are quite appropriate to solve the short-term traffic flow, which can obtain an accuracy more than 95%, while prediction made by SVM is less precise than the two aforementioned methods with a 79% accuracy. And BP neural network may be inappropriate if the parameters remain default. The different results are due to the periodicity of the database. Integration methods can recognize the periodicity while the SVM and BP neural network fail to do it. When employing the SVM and BP neural network, the datasets need to be divided within a period to avoid being disturbed by cyclically. Besides, the precise of BP neural network can be improved when adjusting the parameters to the optimal.