Traffic flow online prediction based on a generative adversarial network with multi-source data

Abstract

Traffic prediction is essential for advanced traffic planning, design, management, and network sustainability. Current prediction methods are mostly offline, which fail to capture the real-time variation of traffic flows. This paper establishes a sustainable online generative adversarial network (GAN) by combining bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) as the generative model and discriminative model, respectively, to keep learning with continuous feedback. BiLSTM constantly generates temporal candidate flows based on valuable memory units, and CNN screens out the best spatial prediction by returning the feedback gradient to BiLSTM. Multi-dimensional indicators are selected to map the multi-view fusion local trend for accurate prediction. To balance computing efficiency and accuracy, different batch sizes are pre-tested and allocated to different lanes. The models are trained with rectified adaptive moment estimation (RAdam) by dividing the dataset into the training and testing sets with a rolling time-domain scheme. In comparison with the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), BiLSTM, generating adversarial network for traffic flow (GAN-TF), and generating adversarial network for non-signal traffic (GAN-NST), the proposed improved generating adversarial network for traffic flow (IGAN-TF) successfully generates more accurate and stable flows and performs better. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.