Performance evaluation of the deep learning approach for traffic flow prediction at different times

Traffic flow prediction is very important in the deployment of intelligent transportation system. Based on our previous research on deep learning approach for traffic data prediction, we further evaluates the performance of the SAE model for traffic flow prediction at daytime and nighttime. Through 250 experimental tasks training a SAE model and evaluating its performance at daytime and nighttime with 3 different criteria, we obtain the best combination of hyper parameters for each criterion at different times on weekday and non-weekday, respectively. Experimental results show that the MAE and RMSE at daytime are larger than that at nighttime, while the MRE at daytime are smaller than that at nighttime. For different criteria, the hyper parameters of the SAE model should vary accordingly. The results in this paper indicate that in real applications, traffic flow prediction using the deep learning approach can be a combination of multiple SAE models with different parameters suitable for different periods, which is of significance in future research.