An adaptive composite time series forecasting model for short-term traffic flow

Abstract Short-term traffic flow forecasting is a hot issue in the field of intelligent transportation. The research field of traffic forecasting has evolved greatly in past decades. With the rapid development of deep learning and neural networks, a series of effective methods have been proposed to address the short-term traffic flow forecasting problem, which makes it possible to examine and forecast traffic situations more accurately than ever. Different from linear based methods, deep learning based methods achieve traffic flow forecasting by exploring the complex nonlinear relationships in traffic flow. Most existing methods always use a single framework for feature extraction and forecasting only. These approaches treat all traffic flow equally and consider them contain same attribute. However, the traffic flow from different time spots or roads may contain distinct attributes information (such as congested and uncongested). A simple single framework usually ignore the different attributes embedded in different distributions of data. This would decrease the accuracy of traffic forecasting. To tackle these issues, we propose an adaptive composite framework, named Long-Short-Combination (LSC). In the proposed method, two data forecasting modules(L and S) are designed for short-term traffic flow with different attributes respectively. Furthermore, we also integrate an attribute forecasting module (C) to forecast the traffic attributes for each time point in future time series. The proposed framework has been assessed on real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model has excellent forecasting performance.