Comprehensive Evaluation Method for Traffic Flow Data Quality Based on Grey Correlation Analysis and Particle Swarm Optimization

Nowadays, data are more and more used for intelligent modeling and prediction, and the comprehensive evaluation of data quality is getting more and more attention as a necessary means to measure whether the data are usable or not. However, the comprehensive evaluation method of data quality mostly contains the subjective factors of the evaluator, so how to comprehensively and objectively evaluate the data has become a bottleneck that needs to be solved in the research of comprehensive evaluation method. In order to evaluate the data more comprehensively, objectively and differentially, a novel comprehensive evaluation method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) and grey correlation analysis (GCA) is presented in this paper. At first, an improved GCA evaluation model based on the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) is proposed. Then, an objective function model of maximum difference of the comprehensive evaluation values is built, and the PSO algorithm is used to optimize the weights of the improved GCA evaluation model based on the objective function model. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is investigated through parameter analysis. A performance comparison of traffic flow data is carried out, and the simulation results show that the maximum average difference between the evaluation results and its mean value (MDR) of the proposed comprehensive evaluation method is 33.24% higher than that of TOPSIS-GCA, and 6.86% higher than that of GCA. The proposed method has better differentiation than other methods, which means that it objectively and comprehensively evaluates the data from both the relevance and differentiation of the data, and the results more effectively reflect the differences in data quality, which will provide more effective data support for intelligent modeling, prediction and other applications.