An Incremental Learning Based Convolutional Neural Network Model for Large-Scale and Short-Term Traffic Flow

Traffic flow prediction is very important for smooth road conditions in cities and convenient travel for residents. With the explosive growth of traffic flow data size, traditional machine learning algorithms cannot fit large-scale training data effectively and the deep learning algorithms do not work well because of the huge training and update costs, and the prediction accuracy may need to be further improved when an emergency affecting traffic occurs. In this study, an incremental learning based convolutional neural network model, TF-net, is proposed to achieve the efficient and accurate prediction of large-scale and short-term traffic flow. The key idea is to introduce the uncertainty features into the model without increasing the training cost to improve the prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, based on the idea of combining incremental learning with active learning, a certain percentage of typical samples in historical traffic flow data are sampled to fine-tune the prediction model, so as to further improve the prediction accuracy for special situations and ensure the real-time requirement. The experimental results show that the proposed traffic flow prediction model has better performance than the existing methods.