Traffic incidents dont only cause various levels of traffic congestion but often contribute to traffic accidents and secondary accidents, resulting in substantial loss of life, economy, and productivity loss in terms of injuries and deaths, increased travel times and delays, and excessive consumption of energy and air pollution. Therefore, it is essential to accurately estimate the duration of the incident to mitigate these effects. Traffic management center incident logs and traffic sensors data from Eastbound Interstate 70 (I-70) in Missouri, United States collected during the period from January 2015 to January 2017, with a total of 352 incident records were used to develop incident duration estimation models. This paper investigated different machine learning (ML) methods for traffic incidents duration prediction. The attempted ML techniques include Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Neural Network Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Root mean squared error (RMSE) and Mean absolute error (MAE) were used to evaluate the performance of these models. The results showed that the performance of the models was comparable with SVM models slightly outperforms the RF, and MLP models in terms of MAE index, where MAE was 14.23 min for the best-performing SVM models. Whereas, in terms of the RMSE index, RF models slightly outperformed the other two models given RMSE of 18.91 min for the best-performing RF model.
Index Terms— Incident Duration, Neural Network Multi-Layer Perceptron, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine.
Predicting Incident Duration Based on Machine Learning Methods
