Short-Term Traffic Forecasting using LSTM-based Deep Learning Models

Accurate short-term traffic volume forecasting has become a component with growing importance in traffic management in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). A significant amount of related works on short-term traffic forecasting has been proposed based on traditional learning approaches, and deep learning-based approaches have also made significant strides in recent years. In this paper, we explore several deep learning models that are based on long-short term memory (LSTM) networks to automatically extract inherent features of traffic volume data for forecasting. A simple LSTM model, LSTM encoder-decoder model, CNN-LSTM model and a Conv-LSTM model were designed and evaluated using a real-world traffic volume dataset for multiple prediction horizons. Finally, the experimental results are analyzed, and the Conv-LSTM model produced the best performance with a MAPE of 9.03% for the prediction horizon of 15 minutes. Also, the paper discusses the behavior of the models with the traffic volume anomalies due to the Covid-19 pandemic.