The Traffic Flow Prediction Method Using the Incremental Learning-Based CNN-LTSM Model: The Solution of Mobile Application

Abstract

With the acceleration of urbanization and the increase in the number of motor vehicles, more and more social problems such as traffic congestion have emerged. Accordingly, efficient and accurate traffic flow prediction has become a research hot spot in the field of intelligent transportation. However, traditional machine learning algorithms cannot further optimize the model with the increase of the data scale, and the deep learning algorithms perform poorly in mobile application or real-time application; how to train and update deep learning models efficiently and accurately is still an urgent problem since they require huge computation resources and time costs. Therefore, an incremental learning-based CNN-LTSM model, IL-TFNet, is proposed for traffic flow prediction in this study. The lightweight convolution neural network-based model architecture is designed to process spatiotemporal and external environment features simultaneously to improve the prediction performance and prediction efficiency of the model. Especially, the K-means clustering algorithm is applied as an uncertainty feature to extract unknown traffic accident information. During the model training, instead of the traditional batch learning algorithm, the incremental learning algorithm is applied to reduce the cost of updating the model and satisfy the requirements of high real-time performance and low computational overhead in short-term traffic prediction. Furthermore, the idea of combining incremental learning with active learning is proposed to fine-tune the prediction model to improve prediction accuracy in special situations. Experiments have proved that compared with other traffic flow prediction models, the IL-TFNet model performs well in short-term traffic flow prediction.