Use of local linear regression model for short-term traffic forecasting

The traffic-forecasting model, when considered as a system with inputs of historical and current data and outputs of future data, behaves in a nonlinear fashion and varies with time of day. Traffic data are found to change abruptly during the transition times of entering and leaving peak periods. Accurate and real-time models are needed to approximate the nonlinear time-variant functions between system inputs and outputs from a continuous stream of training data. A proposed local linear regression model was applied to short-term traffic prediction. The performance of the model was compared with previous results of nonparametric approaches that are based on local constant regression, such as the k-nearest neighbor and kernel methods, by using 32-day traffic-speed data collected on US-290, in Houston, Texas, at 5-min intervals. It was found that the local linear methods consistently showed better performance than the k-nearest neighbor and kernel smoothing methods.