A Bayesian Network Approach to Traffic Flow Forecasting

A new approach based on Bayesian networks for traffic flow forecasting is proposed. In this paper, traffic flows among adjacent road links in a transportation network are modeled as a Bayesian network. The joint probability distribution between the cause nodes (data utilized for forecasting) and the effect node (data to be forecasted) in a constructed Bayesian network is described as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) whose parameters are estimated via the competitive expectation maximization (CEM) algorithm. Finally, traffic flow forecasting is performed under the criterion of minimum mean square error (mmse). The approach departs from many existing traffic flow forecasting models in that it explicitly includes…