Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

6-2017

Abstract

Traffic speed is a key indicator for the efficiency of an urban transportation system. Accurate modeling of the spatiotemporally varying traffic speed thus plays a crucial role in urban planning and development. This paper addresses the problem of efficient fine-grained traffic speed prediction using big traffic data obtained from static sensors. Gaussian processes (GPs) have been previously used to model various traffic phenomena, including flow and speed. However, GPs do not scale with big traffic data due to their cubic time complexity. In this work, we address their efficiency issues by proposing localGPs to learn from and make predictions for correlated subsets of data. The main idea is to quickly group speed variables in both spatial and temporal dimensions into a finite number of clusters, so that future and unobserved traffic speed queries can be heuristically mapped to one of such clusters. A local GP corresponding to that cluster can then be trained on the fly to make predictions in real-time. We call this method localization. We use non-negative matrix factorization for localization and propose simple heuristics for cluster mapping. We additionally leverage on the expressiveness of GP kernel functions to model road network topology and incorporate side information. Extensive experiments using real-world traffic data collected in the two U.S. cities of Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., show that our proposed local GPs significantly improve both runtime performances and prediction accuracies compared to the baseline global and local GPs.

Keywords

Gaussian process, matrix factorization, spatiotemporal clustering, traffic speed, urban computing

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Computer Sciences | Theory and Algorithms

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Big Data

Volume

3

Issue

2

First Page

194

Last Page

207

ISSN

2332-7790

Identifier

10.1109/TBDATA.2016.2620488

Publisher

IEEE

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TBDATA.2016.2620488

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