A Hybrid Model for Short-Term Traffic Volume Prediction in Massive Transportation Systems

The prediction of short-term volatile traffic becomes increasingly critical for efficient traffic engineering in intelligent transportation systems. Accurate forecast results can assist in traffic management and pedestrian route selection, which will help alleviate the huge congestion problem in the system. This paper presents a novel hybrid DTMGP model to accurately forecast the volume of passenger flows multi-step ahead with the comprehensive consideration of factors from temporal, origin-destination spatial, and frequency and self-similarity perspectives. We first apply discrete wavelet transform to decompose the traffic volume series into an appropriation component and several detailed components. Then we propose a more efficient tracking model to forecast the appropriation component and a novel Gaussian process model to forecast the detailed components. The forecasting performance is evaluated with real-time passenger flow data in Chongqing, China. Simulation results demonstrate that our hybrid model can achieve on average 20%-50% accuracy improvement, especially during rush hours.