Short Term Traffic Flow Prediction Using Hybrid Deep Learning

Traffic flow prediction in urban areas is essential in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Short Term Traffic Flow (STTF) prediction impacts traffic flow series, where an estimation of the number of vehicles will appear during the next instance of time per hour. Precise STTF is critical in Intelligent Transportation System. Various extinct systems aim for short-term traffic forecasts, ensuring a good precision outcome which was a significant task over the past few years. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new model to predict STTF for every hour of a day. In this paper, we have proposed a novel hybrid algorithm utilizing Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Stacked Auto-Encoder (SAE), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) named PALKNN. Firstly, PCA removes unwanted information from the dataset and selects essential features. Secondly, SAE is used to reduce the dimension of input data using one-hot encoding so the model can be trained with better speed. Thirdly, LSTM takes the input from SAE, where the data is sorted in ascending order based on the important features and generates the derived value. Finally, KNN Regressor takes information from LSTM to predict traffic flow. The forecasting performance of the PALKNN model is investigated with Open Road Traffic Statistics dataset, Great Britain, UK. This paper enhanced the traffic flow prediction for every hour of a day with a minimal error value. An extensive experimental analysis was performed on the benchmark dataset. The evaluated results indicate the significant improvement of the proposed PALKNN model over the recent approaches such as KNN, SARIMA, Logistic Regression, RNN, and LSTM in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.07%, mean square error (MSE) of 4.1%, and mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.04%.