A multivariate short-term traffic flow forecasting method based on wavelet analysis and seasonal time series

Short-term traffic flow forecasting is a key step to achieve the performance of intelligent transportation system (ITS). Timely and accurate traffic information prediction is also the prerequisite of realizing proactive traffic control and dynamic traffic assignment effectively. Based on the fact that univariate forecasting methods have limited forecasting abilities when the data is missing or erroneous and that single models make no full use of information underline data, a new hybrid method with multivariate for short-term traffic flow forecasting is proposed. This method combines statistical analysis method with computational intelligence techniques to mine the characteristic of traffic flow as well as forecast short-term traffic state. First, the wavelet de-noising is employed to remove the noise information. Then, time series analysis is used to analyze time-varying and periodic characteristic of traffic flow. Furthermore, the seasonal auto-regressive moving average with external input (SARIMAX) is established to fit traffic flow with occupancy as exogenous variables. Finally, wavelet forecast is adopted to forecast the values of occupancy which are used as exogenous input, and a WSARIMAX is constructed to forecast traffic flow. Using the relationship of flow and occupancy at the same road section and taking traffic flow and occupancy data from freeway I-694 EB in the Twin Cities as endogenous variables and exogenous variables respectively, this paper studies the forecasting performance of the proposed method. The study results are encouraging. Compared with SARIMA newly proposed in literature, WSARIMA and SARIMAX improved method with wavelet analysis and multivariate modeling method, the proposed method gets improvements of 12.95%, 12.62% and 10.41% in forecasting accuracy of one-step ahead respectively. For ten-steps ahead forecasting, it gets improvements of 18.87%, 17.05% and 2.57% in forecasting accuracy respectively.