A Comparison of Detrending Models and Multi-Regime Models for Traffic Flow Prediction

Short-term traffic flow prediction received considerations from different fields, because of its essentialness in traffic engineering and its theoretical difficulties. In this paper, we studied two important approaches of traffic flow prediction: detrending methods and multi-regime methods. First, we compared their differences in modeling philosophy and compared their merits as well as shortcomings. Then, we tested several representative prediction models of these two approaches on the openly accessible PeMS traffic flow database to find their merits and shortcomings. The obtained results threw some interesting light on how to select the appropriate traffic prediction models in practices.