Ensemble Learning for Short-Term Traffic Prediction Based on Gradient Boosting Machine

Short-term traffic prediction is vital for intelligent traffic systems and influenced by neighboring traffic condition. Gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT), an ensemble learning method, is proposed to make short-term traffic prediction based on the traffic volume data collected by loop detectors on the freeway. Each new simple decision tree is sequentially added and trained with the error of the previous whole ensemble model at each iteration. The relative importance of variables can be quantified in the training process of GBDT, indicating the interaction between input variables and response. The influence of neighboring traffic condition on prediction performance is identified through combining the traffic volume data collected by different upstream and downstream detectors as the input, which can also improve prediction performance. The relative importance of input variables for 15 GBDT models is different, and the impact of upstream traffic condition is not balanced with that of downstream. The prediction accuracy of GBDT is generally higher than SVM and BPNN for different steps ahead, and the accuracy of multi-step-ahead models is lower than 1-step-ahead models. For 1-step-ahead models, the prediction errors of GBDT are smaller than SVM and BPNN for both peak and nonpeak hours.