An online approach based on locally weighted learning for short-term traffic flow prediction

Traffic flow prediction is a basic function of Intelligent Transportation System. Due to the complexity of traffic phenomenon, most existing methods build complex models such as neural networks for traffic flow prediction. As a model may lose effect with time lapse, it is important to update the model on line. However, the high computational cost of maintaining a complex model puts great challenge for model updating. The high computation cost lies in two aspects: computation of complex model coefficients and huge amount training data for it. In this paper, we propose to use a nonparametric approach based on locally weighted learning to predict traffic flow. Our approach incrementally incorporates new data to the model and is computationally efficient, which makes it suitable for online model updating and predicting. In addition, we adopt wavelet analysis to extract the periodic characteristic of the traffic data, which is then used for the input of the prediction model instead of the raw traffic flow data. The primary experiments on real data demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.