Evaluating Deep Learning Algorithms for Freeway Mainstream Traffic Control

Publication Name: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems

Publication Date: 2025-01-01

Volume: 1258 LNNS

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 289-299

Description:

Traffic congestion is a universal problem that significantly impacts urban mobility and economic productivity. Accurate traffic flow prediction is crucial for efficient traffic management and congestion mitigation. Traditional methods often struggle to capture the complex temporal dependencies in traffic data. This study explores the effectiveness of Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) models compared to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models for predicting traffic volumes on freeway networks. Previous research has largely focused on LSTM models, leaving a gap in understanding the potential advantages of TCN models in this context. We address this gap by conducting a comprehensive comparison of LSTM and TCN models, training them on a dataset representing approximate traffic flow, and evaluating their performance using metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and coefficient of determination (R2). Our findings indicate that the TCN model outperforms the LSTM model, achieving lower MSE and MAE values and a higher R2 score. These results suggest that TCN models can more accurately predict traffic volumes under conditions with the least captured traffic data, offering a promising tool for real-time approximate traffic management and congestion prevention with reasonable prediction performance.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-81799-1_26

Authors - 3