Short-term traffic flow prediction is important to realize real-time traffic instruction. However, due to the existing strong nonlinearity and non-stationarity in short-term traffic volume data, it is hard to obtain a satisfactory result through the traditional method. To this end, this paper develops an innovative hybrid method based on the time varying filtering based empirical mode decomposition (TVF-EMD) and least square support vector machine (LSSVM). Specifically, TVF-EMD is firstly used to deal with the implied non-stationarity in the original data by decomposing them into several different subseries. Then, the LSSVM models are established for each subseries to capture the linear and nonlinear characteristics embedded in the original data, and the corresponding prediction results are superimposed to obtain the final one. Finally, case studies based on two groups of data measured from an arterial road intersection are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results indicate it outperforms the other involved models. For example, compared with the LSSVM model, the average improvements by the proposed method in terms of the indexes of mean absolute error, mean relative percentage error, root mean square error and root mean square relative error are 7.397, 15.832%, 10.707 and 24.471%, respectively.

The linearity and heteroscedasticity are the important characteristics of short‐term traffic flow data. Generally, the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model are respectively used to explain these characteristics. However, the prerequisite for the use of ARIMA is that the training residuals should follow the standard Gaussian distribution, which is hard to be satisfied in practice. Meanwhile, the variance in the GARCH model usually neglects the time‐varying characteristic. To address these problems, this paper proposes an innovative method based on the combination of ARIMA, maximum correntropy criterion (MCC), conditional kernel density estimation (CKDE), and GARCH. Specifically, the MCC method is first employed to estimate the coefficients of the ARIMA model (i.e. ARIMA‐MCC), by which the linear prediction is conducted. Then, the CKDE model is established to describe the training residuals obtained by ARIMA‐MCC and estimate the time‐varying variance in the GARCH model (i.e. GARCH‐CKDE). Case studies based on four groups of data measured in the urban road are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Compared with the traditional ARIMA model, the improvement by the proposed method reaches 14.45% in terms of the evaluation criterion of mean absolute percentage error.

Strong nonstationary and nonlinearity are the main characteristics in the short-term traffic flow data, which frustrates traditional methods (e.g., autoregressive integrated moving average and deep belief network) to provide a satisfactory prediction. To address the above problem, a novel forecasting method, which is composed of a secondary decomposition technique and extreme learning machine, is proposed in this study. This developed technique is a hybrid of time-varying filtering-empirical mode decomposition (TVF-EMD) and local mean decomposition (LMD), which not only can effectively handle the above complex data features by decomposing them into several regular subsets but also produce the smoother subseries that is beneficial to prediction. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a case study based on two groups of actual traffic flow data with different characteristics is performed. Meanwhile, several single models and hybrid models based on the other decomposition methods (e.g., EMD and variational mode decomposition) are considered benchmark models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model presents the best performance. For example, compared with the TVF-EMD-based method, the improvement by the proposed approach reaches 33.3% in terms of the evaluation criterion of mean absolute percentage error.