MODELING CROSS-CORRELATIONS OF TRAFFIC FLOW

The study of diverse natural and nonstationary signals has recently become an area of active research for physicists. This is because these signals exhibit interesting dynamical properties such as scale invariance, volatility correlation, heavy tails and fractality. The focus of the present paper is on the intriguing power-law autocorrelations and cross-correlations in traffic series. Detrended Cross-Correlation Analysis (DCCA) is used to study the traffic flow fluctuations. It is demonstrated that the time series, observed on the Anhua-Bridge highway in the Beijing Third Ring Road (BTRR), may exhibit power-law cross-correlations when they come from two adjacent sections or lanes. This indicates that a large increment in one traffic variable is more likely to be followed by large increment in the other traffic variable. However, for traffic time series derived from nonadjacent sections or lanes, we find that even though they are power-law autocorrelated, there is no cross-correlation between them with a unique exponent. Our results show that DCCA techniques based on Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) can be used to analyze and interpret the traffic flow.