A Hybrid Univariate Traffic Congestion Prediction Model for IoT-Enabled Smart City

IoT devices collect time-series traffic data, which is stochastic and complex in nature. Traffic flow prediction is a thorny task using this kind of data. A smart traffic congestion prediction system is a need of sustainable and economical smart cities. An intelligent traffic congestion prediction model using Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) is presented in this study. The novelty of this model is that the proposed model is hybridized using a Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN). Instead of traditionally presuming the relationship of forecasted results of the SARIMA and Bi-LSTM model as a linear relationship, this model uses BPNN to discover the unknown function to establish a relation between the forecasted values. This model uses SARIMA to handle linear components and Bi-LSTM to handle non-linear components of the Big IoT time-series dataset. The "CityPulse EU FP7 project" is a freely available dataset used in this study. This hybrid univariate model is compared with the single ARIMA, single LSTM, and existing traffic prediction models using MAE, MSE, RMSE, and MAPE as evaluation indicators. This model provides the lowest values of MAE, MSE, RMSE, and MAPE as 0.499, 0.337, 0.58, and 0.03, respectively. The proposed model can help to predict the vehicle count on the road, which in turn, can enhance the quality of life for citizens living in smart cities.