Short-term traffic flow forecasting for urban roads using data-driven feature selection strategy and bias-corrected random forests

Urban traffic flow forecasting is essential to proactive traffic control and management. Most existing forecasting methods depend on proper and reliable input features, for example, weather conditions and spatiotemporal lagged variables of traffic flow. However, the feature selection process is often done manually without comprehensive evaluation and leads to inaccurate results. For that challenge, this paper presents an approach combining the bias-corrected random forests algorithm with a data-driven feature selection strategy for short-term urban traffic flow forecasting. First, several input features were extracted from traffic flow time series data. Then the importance of these features was quantified with the permutation importance measure. Next, a data-driven feature selection strategy was introduced to identify the most important features. Finally, the forecasting model was built on the bias-corrected random forests algorithm and the selected features. The proposed approach was validated with data collected from three types of urban roads (express-way, major arterial, and minor arterial) in Kunshan City, China. The proposed approach was also compared with 10 existing approaches to verify its effectiveness. The results of the validation and comparison show that even without further model tuning, the proposed approach achieves the lowest average mean absolute error and root mean square error on six stations while it achieves the second-best average performance in mean absolute percentage error. Meanwhile, the training efficiency is improved compared with the original random forests method owing to the use of the feature selection strategy.