City-Wide Traffic Congestion Prediction Based on CNN, LSTM and Transpose CNN

Traffic congestion is a significant problem faced by large and growing cities that hurt the economy, commuters, and the environment. Forecasting the congestion level of a road network timely can prevent its formation and increase the efficiency and capacity of the road network. However, despite its importance, traffic congestion prediction is not a hot topic among the researcher and traffic engineers. It is due to the lack of high-quality city-wide traffic data and computationally efficient algorithms for traffic prediction. In this paper, we propose (i) an efficient and inexpensive city-wide data acquisition scheme by taking a snapshot of traffic congestion map from an open-source online web service; Seoul Transportation Operation and Information Service (TOPIS), and (ii) a hybrid neural network architecture formed by combing Convolutional Neural Network, Long Short-Term Memory, and Transpose Convolutional Neural Network to extract the spatial and temporal information from the input image to predict the network-wide congestion level. Our experiment shows that the proposed model can efficiently and effectively learn both spatial and temporal relationships for traffic congestion prediction. Our model outperforms two other deep neural networks (Auto-encoder and ConvLSTM) in terms of computational efficiency and prediction performance.