Evaluation of the Gradient Boosting of Regression Trees Method on Estimating Car-Following Behavior

Car-following models, as the essential part of traffic microscopic simulations, have been utilized to analyze and estimate longitudinal drivers' behavior for sixty years. The conventional car-following models use mathematical formulas to replicate human behavior in car-following phenomenon. The incapability of these approaches to capture the complex interactions between vehicles calls for deploying advanced learning frameworks to consider more detailed behavior of drivers. In this study, we apply the gradient boosting of regression tree (GBRT) algorithm to vehicle trajectory data sets, which have been collected through the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) program, to develop a new car-following model. First, the regularization parameters of the proposed method are tuned using cross-validation technique and sensitivity analysis. Second, prediction performance of the GBRT is compared to the world-famous Gazis-Herman-Rothery (GHR) model, when both models have been trained on the same data sets. The estimation results of the models on unseen records indicate the superiority of the GBRT algorithm in capturing the motion characteristics of two successive vehicles.