Enlargement of Traffic Information Coverage Area Using Selective Imputation of Floating Car Data

This paper discusses a real-time imputation method for sparse floating car data (FCD.) Floating cars are effective way to collect traffic information; however, because of the limitation of the number of floating cars, there is a large amount of missing data with FCD. In an effort to address this problem, we previously proposed a new imputation method based on feature space projection. The method consists of three major processes: (i) determination of a feature space from past FCD history; (ii) feature space projection of current FCD; and (iii) estimation of missing data performed by inverse projection from the feature space. Since estimation is achieved on each feature space axis that represents the spatial correlated component of FCD, it performs an accurate imputation and enlarges information coverage area. However, correlation difference among multiple road-links sometimes causes a trade-off problem between the accuracy and the coverage. Therefore, we developed an additional function in order to filter the road-links that have low correlation with the others. The function uses spectral factorization as filtering index, which is suitable to evaluate the correlation on the multidimensional feature space. Combination use of the imputation method and the filtering function decreases maximum estimation error-rate from 0.39 to 0.24, keeping 60% coverage area against sparse FCD of 15% observations.