Unsupervised learning based performance analysis of n-support vector regression for speed prediction of a large road network

Many intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications require accurate prediction of traffic parameters. Previous studies have shown that data driven machine learning methods like support vector regression (SVR) can effectively and accurately perform this task. However, these studies focus on highways, or a few road segments. We propose a robust and scalable method using v-SVR to tackle the problem of speed prediction of a large heterogeneous road network. The traditional performance measures such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE) provide little insight into spatial and temporal characteristics of prediction methods for a large network. This inadequacy can be a serious hurdle in effective implementation of prediction models for route guidance, congestion avoidance, dynamic traffic assignment and other ITS applications. We propose unsupervised learning techniques by employing k-means clustering, principal component analysis (PCA), and self organizing maps (SOM) to overcome this insufficiency. We establish the effectiveness of the developed methods by evaluation of spatial and temporal characteristics of prediction performance of the proposed variable window v-SVR method.