Multivariate Congestion Prediction using Stacked LSTM Autoencoder based Bidirectional LSTM Model

In intelligent transportation systems, traffic management is an important task. The accurate forecasting of traffic characteristics like flow, congestion, and density is still active research because of the non-linear nature and uncertainty of the spatiotemporal data. Inclement weather, such as rain and snow, and other special events such as holidays, accidents, and road closures have a significant impact on driving and the average speed of vehicles on the road, which lowers traffic capacity and causes congestion in a widespread manner. This work designs a model for multivariate short-term traffic congestion prediction using SLSTM_AE-BiLSTM. The proposed design consists of a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory(BiLSTM) network to predict traffic flow value and a Convolutional Neural network (CNN) model for detecting the congestion status. This model uses spatial static temporal dynamic data. The stacked Long Short Term Memory Autoencoder (SLSTM AE) is used to encode the weather features into a reduced and more informative feature space. BiLSTM model is used to capture the features from the past and present traffic data simultaneously and also to identify the long-term dependencies. It uses the traffic data and encoded weather data to perform the traffic flow prediction. The CNN model is used to predict the recurring congestion status based on the predicted traffic flow value at a particular urban traffic network. In this work, a publicly available Caltrans PEMS dataset with traffic parameters is used. The proposed model generates the congestion prediction with an accuracy rate of 92.74% which is slightly better when compared with other deep learning models for congestion prediction.