Geographic and Temporal Deep Learning Method for Traffic Flow Prediction in Highway Network

Tianpu Zhang, Weilong Ding, Mengda Xing, Jun Chen, Yongkang Du, Ying Liang

Abstract: Traffic congestion has become an inevitable situation faced by all countries and the prediction accuracy of traffic flow, as one of the means to solve this problem, still needs to be improved. Most studies lack the consideration of the influence of multiple factors such as spatial factors, time series factors and other external factors, which makes the prediction effect of traffic flow unsatisfactory. In this paper a method is proposed based on deep learning that can capture the geographic spatial relationship among toll stations, the dynamic temporal relationship of historical traffic flow, extreme weather and calendar types. On the three metrics of MAPE, MAE, and RMSE, the prediction effect of our model has increased by 30% compared with KNN, GBRT and LSTM models.