Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Random Subspace Learning for Short-term Traffic Flow Prediction with Incomplete Data

Traffic flow prediction is a fundamental component in intelligent transportation systems. However, many existing prediction models endure several shortages. Most of the methods are constructed as a shallow model, which is difficult to reveal the intrinsic spatio-temporal relations embedded in traffic raw data. Moreover, the separation of feature learning and predictor learning brings a sacrifice of model performance. Then the hand designed features are difficult to be tuned appropriately. Finally, few existing methods consider the incomplete data problem which is in fact very severe for practical application. In this work, we develop a deep learning model to predict traffic flows. The main contribution is development of an architecture that integrates random subspace learning and ensemble learning on deep convolutional neural networks. The proposed model takes the traffic flow data as an image, and considers both exploring spatio-temporal correlations in the unified architecture and the incomplete data problem. The experimental results, using traffic data originated from the California Freeway Performance Measurement System (PeMS), corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared with the state of the art.