Novel Sparse Feature Regression Method for Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is an integral part of modern intelligent transportation systems. Although many techniques have been proposed in the literature to address the problem, most of them focus almost exclusively on forecasting accuracy and ignore other important aspects of the problem. In the paper at hand, a new method for both accurate and fast large-scale traffic forecasting, named “sparse feature regression”, is presented. Initially, a set of carefully selected features is extracted from the available traffic data. Then, some of the initial features are sparsified, namely they are transformed into sets of sparse features. Finally, a linear regression model is designed using the sparse feature set, which is trained by solving an optimization problem using a sparse approximate pseudoinverse as a preconditioner. We evaluated the proposed method by conducting experiments on two real-world traffic datasets, and the experimental results showed that the method presents the best balance between accuracy of predictions and time required for achieving them, in comparison with a set of benchmark models.