Long-term traffic pattern forecasting using dynamic classifier selection

Abstract

Dynamic Classifier Selection (DCS) techniques aim to select the most competent classifiers from an ensemble per test sample. For each test sample, only a subset of the most competent classifiers is used to estimate its target value. The performance of the DCS highly depends on how we define the local region of competence, which is a local region in the feature space around the test sample. In this paper, we propose a new definition of region of competence based on a new proximity measure. We exploit the observed similarities between traffic profiles at different links, days and hours to obtain similarities between different values. Furthermore, long-term traffic pattern prediction is a complex problem and most of the traffic prediction literature are based on time-series and regression approaches and their prediction time is limited to next few hours or days. We tackle the long-term traffic pattern prediction as a classification of discretized traffic indicators to improve the accuracy of urban traffic pattern forecasting of next weeks by using DCS. We also employ two different link clustering methods, for grouping traffic links. For each cluster, we train a dynamic classifier system for predicting the traffic variables (flow, speed and journey time). Our results on strategic road network data shows that the proposed method outperforms the existing ensemble and baseline models in long-term traffic prediction.