An Effective Self-Attention-Based Hybrid Model for Short-Term Traffic Flow Prediction

Vehicle exhaust is one of the main sources of carbon emissions. The short-term traffic flow prediction plays an important role in alleviating traffic congestion, optimizing the travel structure, and reducing traffic carbon emissions. The current advanced models of short-term traffic flow prediction are evaluated in this work, especially their inadequacies. To improve the prediction accuracy and ensure fine traffic management, an effective self-attention-based hybrid model is proposed to predict the short-term traffic flow. The proposed model includes an encoder-decoder neural network module and a self-attention mechanism module. The self-attention mechanism module is applied as a feature extraction unit in this hybrid model to enhance the ability of key information capture and to settle the problem on key information disappearing due to the increasing sequence length in traditional models. The dataset of the Guangdong freeway toll station is used for the experimental testing. Compared with several baseline models, the proposed model is more suitable for real-time prediction and can provide highly accurate results. Also, a better interpretability is presented in this proposed model. The experimental results showed that MAE, RMSE, and MAPE of the proposed model are 3.01, 4.38, and 12.99%, respectively. Our new hybrid model gives a higher accuracy than the support vector regression (SVR) model, LSTM neural network-attention (LSTM-attention) model, and temporal convolutional network (TCN) model. It shows that the proposed model in this work is favorable to the short-term traffic flow prediction.