Hybrid CSA optimization with seasonal RVR in traffic flow forecasting

Accurate traffic flow forecasting is critical to the development and implementation of city intelligent transportation systems. Therefore, it is one of the most important components in the research of urban traffic scheduling. However, traffic flow forecasting involves a rather complex nonlinear data pattern, particularly during workday peak periods, and a lot of research has shown that traffic flow data reveals a seasonal trend. This paper proposes a new traffic flow forecasting model that combines seasonal relevance vector regression with the hybrid chaotic simulated annealing method (SRVRCSA). Additionally, a numerical example of traffic flow data from The Transportation Data Research Laboratory is used to elucidate the forecasting performance of the proposed SRVRCSA model. The forecasting results indicate that the proposed model yields more accurate forecasting results than the seasonal auto regressive integrated moving average (SARIMA), the double seasonal Holt-Winters exponential smoothing (DSHWES), and the relevance vector regression with hybrid Chaotic Simulated Annealing method (RVRCSA) models. The forecasting performance of RVRCSA with different kernel functions is also studied.