Fast autoregressive tensor decomposition for online real-time traffic flow prediction

Online real-time traffic flow prediction typically offers better real-time performance than offline prediction. However, existing studies rarely discussed online real-time traffic flow prediction and the balance between prediction accuracy and computational costs. Training and predicting traffic flow data with complex patterns by artificial intelligence models is usually time-consuming. Some high-accuracy statistical learning methods also reach a performance bottleneck in terms of computational speed. Therefore, a Fast Autoregressive Tensor Decomposition (FATD) algorithm is proposed for online real-time traffic flow prediction. First, the historical tensor data is decomposed by Tucker Decomposition into factor matrices and easy-to-compute core tensors, and these core tensors are modeled by Tensor Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (Tensor SARIMA). Second, a future core tensor is predicted by Tensor SARIMA. By the Inverse Tucker Decomposition, the traffic flow data to be predicted is recovered. The experimental results show that the FATD algorithm can reduce the computational cost while maintaining high accuracy. Compared with baselines, the FATD algorithm reduces MAE, RMSE, and the computational cost by approximately 35.04%, 26.86%, and 99.28% on average, respectively.