A Multitask Learning Model for Traffic Flow and Speed Forecasting

• Main Authors: Kunpeng Zhang, Lan Wu, Zhaoju Zhu, Jiang Deng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2020-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Short-term traffic forecasting; deep learning; multitask learning; feature engineering
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9080108/

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research and applications benefit from accurate short-term traffic state forecasting. To improve the forecasting accuracy, this paper proposes a deep learning based multitask learning Gated Recurrent Units (MTL-GRU) with residual mappings. To enhance the performance of the MTL-GRU, feature engineering is introduced to select the most informative features for the forecasting. Then, based on real-world datasets, numerical results show that the MTL-GRU can well estimate traffic flow and speed simultaneously, and performs better than other counterparts. Experiments also show that the deep learning based MTL-GRU model can overpower the bottleneck caused by enlarging training datasets and continue to gain benefits. The results suggest the proposed MTL-GRU model with residual mappings is promising to forecast short-term traffic state.