Forecasting collector road speeds under high percentage of missing data

Abstract

Accurate road speed predictions can help drivers in smart route planning. Although the issue has been studied previously, most existing work focus on arterial roads only, where sensors are configured closely for collecting complete real-time data. For collector roads where sensors sparsely cover, however, speed predictions are often ignored. With GPS-equipped floating car signals being available nowadays, we aim at forecasting collector road speeds by utilizing these signals. The main challenge compared with arterial roads comes from the missing data. In a time slot of the real case, over 90% of collector roads cannot be covered by enough floating cars. Thus most traditional approaches for arterial roads, relying on complete historical data, cannot be employed directly. Aiming at solving this problem, we propose a multi-view road speed prediction framework. In the first view, temporal patterns are modeled by a layered hidden Markov model; and in the second view, spatial patterns are modeled by a collective matrix factorization model. The two models are learned and inferred simultaneously in a co-regularized manner. Experiments conducted in the Beijing road network, based on I OK taxi signals in 2 years, have demonstrated that the approach outperforms traditional approaches by 10% in MAE and RMSE.