Investigation of Favorable Neural Network Methods to Estimate Traffic Components

Neural networks provide the opportunity to estimate specific components of engineering problems. They are decomposed complex problems into different parts. Thus, it can be easy to compete with each of them through neural networks. In this paper, it was purposed to estimate the average speed of a 6-line road’s cross-section by observed traffic variables, such as numbers of vehicles and occupancy values, using radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), generalized regression neural network (GRNN) and the feed-forward back propagation neural network (FFBPNN) models. A comparison was fulfilled between different neural networks and checked against multivariate linear regression (MVLR), a conventional statistical model. After each simulation of neural networks, results show that different forecasts were obtained under the same conditions. The best forecasting is made by FFBPNN, GRNN, and RBFNN, respectively. When compared with multivariate linear regression (MVLR), FFBPNN performs better than MVLR, but GRNN and RBFNN perform lower than it.