Abstract
Traffic flow (TF) prediction is an important and yet a challenging task in transportation systems, since the TF involves high nonlinearities and is affected by many elements. Recently, neural networks have attracted much attention for TF prediction, but they are commonly black boxes with complex architectures and difficult to be interpreted, e.g., the contributions of specific traffic elements are not explicit, hardly providing informative guidance. In this paper, we aim at addressing more interpretable short-term TF prediction with joint consideration to high accuracy, and thus introduces a pragmatic method by applying the efficient hinging hyperplanes neural network (EHHNN) simply built upon sparse neuron connections. In the proposed method, different traffic factors are incorporated into the inputs, including their spatial-temporal information. Besides the pursuit of accuracy, we further extend the ANOVA decomposition of EHHNNs to the interpretation analysis with specifications to traffic data, in which the contributions concerning specific traffic variables are detected quantitatively. As such, the proposed method firstly applies the EHHNN to filter out more important traffic variables for dimensionality reduction while maintaining accurate prediction. Then, variable interpretation analysis is performed from different perspectives, e.g. to quantitatively investigate the influence of traffic factors and also their spatial-temporal impacts. Therefore, a predictor and an analyzing tool can both be attained for the TF by exerting the flexibility and extending the interpretability of EHHNNs, which is promising to provide informative guidance to future traffic control. Numerical experiments verify the effectiveness and potential of the proposed method in TF prediction and analysis.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 15616-15628 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 9 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-careOtherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Keywords
- Analysis of variance
- Artificial neural networks
- Data models
- Feature extraction
- interpretation
- Neurons
- Numerical models
- piecewise linear neural networks
- Predictive models
- Traffic flow prediction
- variables analysis.