Traffic flow prediction on urban road network based on License Plate Recognition data: combining attention-LSTM with Genetic Algorithm

Exploring traffic flow characteristics and predicting its variation patterns are the basis of Intelligent Transportation Systems. The intermittent characteristics and intense fluctuation on short-term scales make it a significant challenge on urban roads. A hybrid model, Genetic Algorithm with Attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (GA-LSTM), combining with spatial–temporal correlation analysis, is proposed in this study to predict traffic volumes on urban roads. The spatial correlation is captured by combining the volume transition matrix estimated from vehicle trajectories and network weight matrix quantified from different detectors. The temporal dependency is explored by the attention mechanism, and we introduce the Genetic Algorithm to optimize it. In the experiment, traffic flow data collected from License Plate Recognition (LPR), is utilized to validate the effectiveness of model. The comparison is conducted with several traditional models to show the superiority of the proposed model with higher accuracy and better stability.