Traffic flow forecasting is the key to an intelligent transportation system (ITS). Currently, the short-term traffic flow forecasting methods based on deep learning need to be further improved in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. Therefore, a short-term traffic flow forecasting model GA-TCN based on genetic algorithm (GA) optimized time convolutional neural network (TCN) is proposed in this paper. The prediction error was considered as the fitness value and the genetic algorithm was used to optimize the filters, kernel size, batch size, and dilations hyperparameters of the temporal convolutional neural network to determine the optimal fitness prediction model. Finally, the model was tested using the public dataset PEMS. The results showed that the average absolute error of the proposed GA-TCN decreased by 34.09%, 22.42%, and 26.33% compared with LSTM, GRU, and TCN in working days, while the average absolute error of the GA-TCN decreased by 24.42%, 2.33%, and 3.92% in weekend days, respectively. The results indicate that the model proposed in this paper has a better adaptability and higher prediction accuracy in short-term traffic flow forecasting compared with the existing models. The proposed model can provide important support for the formulation of a dynamic traffic control scheme.
Joint Feature Selection and Parameter Tuning for Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting Based on Heuristically Optimized Multi-layer Neural Networks