Highway Traffic Flow Prediction

Abstract

A growing problem today is highway tollgates causing traffic bottlenecks. The long wait times at tollgates during rush hour are a cause of major traffic congestion. A solution to this would be predicting when these rushes of traffic occur. Using traffic flow data from the 2017 KDD Cup Challenge, our objective is to help mitigate this problem by trying to determine what factors cause traffic to pileup. If we can figure out when traffic is going to become congested, we can inform the tollgates when they should open up more resources to handle the increase in cars, thereby decreasing traffic bottlenecks. There are a number of factors that can determine traffic patterns, such as weather conditions, times of the day, holidays, accidents, etc. We examine these factors along with past traffic data to try and predict when traffic congestion will occur.