Supervised weighting-online learning algorithm for short-term traffic flow prediction

Prediction of short-term traffic flow has become one of the major research fields in intelligent transportation systems. Accurately estimated traffic flow forecasts are important for operating effective and proactive traffic management systems in the context of dynamic traffic assignment. For predicting short-term traffic flows, recent traffic information is clearly a more significant indicator of the near-future traffic flow. In other words, the relative significance depending on the time difference between traffic flow data should be considered. Although there have been several research works for short-term traffic flow predictions, they are offline methods. This paper presents a novel prediction model, called online learning weighted support-vector regression (OLWSVR), for short-term traffic flow predictions. The OLWSVR model is compared with several well-known prediction models, including artificial neural network models, locally weighted regression, conventional support-vector regression, and online learning support-vector regression. The results show that the performance of the proposed model is superior to that of existing models.