Short-Term Traffic Speed Prediction Method for Urban Road Sections Based on Wavelet Transform and Gated Recurrent Unit

As a core component of the urban intelligent transportation system, traffic prediction is significant for urban traffic control and guidance. However, it is challenging to achieve accurate traffic prediction due to the complex spatiotemporal correlation of traffic data. A road section speed prediction model based on wavelet transform and neural network is, therefore, proposed in this article to improve traffic prediction methods. The wavelet transform is used to decompose the original traffic speed data, and then the coefficients obtained after the decomposition are used to reconstruct the high-frequency random sequences and the low-frequency trend sequence. Secondly, a GRU neural network is constructed to learn the trend of low-frequency sequence. The spatiotemporal correlation between input data is extracted by adjusting the input of the model. Meanwhile, an ARMA model is used to fit unstable random fluctuations of high-frequency sequences. Last of all, the prediction results of the two models are added together to obtain the final prediction result. The proposed prediction model is validated by using road section speed data based on the floating car data collected in Ningbo. The results show that the proposed model has high accuracy and robustness.