Accurate and timely estimation of freeway traffic speeds by short segments plays an important role in traffic monitoring systems. In the literature, the ability of machine learning techniques to capture the stochastic characteristics of traffic has been proved. Also, the deployment of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) has provided enriched traffic data, which enables the adoption of a variety of machine learning methods to estimate freeway traffic speeds. However, the limitation of data quality and coverage remain a big challenge in current traffic monitoring systems. To overcome this problem, this study aims to develop a hybrid machine learning approach, by creating a new training variable based on the second-order traffic flow model, to improve the accuracy of traffic speed estimation. Grounded on a novel integrated framework, the estimation is performed using three machine learning techniques, that is, Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). All three models are trained with the integrated dataset including the traffic flow model estimates and the iPeMS and PeMS data from the Utah Department of Transportation (DOT). Further using the PeMS data as the ground truth for model evaluation, the comparisons between the hybrid approach and pure machine learning models show that the hybrid approach can effectively capture the time-varying pattern of the traffic and help improve the estimation accuracy.


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    Title :

    A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach for Freeway Traffic Speed Estimation


    Additional title:

    Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2020-07-07




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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