A Capsule Network for Traffic Speed Prediction in Complex Road Networks
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This paper proposes an approach for vehicular spatio-temporal characteristics prediction of traffic flow in complex road networks with a deep learning approach. Traffic flow data from inductive sensors are essentially a time series, which is also spatially related to traffic in different road segments. The spatio-temporal traffic data from can be converted into an image where the traffic data are expressed in a 3D space with respect to space and time axes. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been showing surprising performance in understanding images, they have a major drawback. In the max pooling operation CNNs are losing important information by locally taking the highest activation values. The inter-relationship in traffic data measured by sparsely located sensors in different time intervals should not be neglected in order to obtain accurate predictions. Thus, we propose a neural network with capsules that replaces max pooling by dynamic routing. This is the first approach that employs the capsule network on a time series forecasting problem, to our best knowledge. Moreover, an experiment on real traffic speed data measured in the Santander city of Spain demonstrates the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method based on a CNN by 8.6 squared error.
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