Short-term traffic flow forecasting is an essential part of intelligent transportation systems. However, it is challenging to model traffic flow accurately due to its rapid changes over time. The Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) has shown parameter efficiency with lower memory and computational overhead via spline-parametrized functions to handle high-dimensional temporal data. In this paper, we propose to unlock the potential of the Kolmogorov–Arnold network for traffic flow forecasting by optimizing its parameters with a heuristic algorithm. The gravitational search algorithm learns to understand optimized KANs for different traffic scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The RMSE of GSA-KAN is reduced by $3.95\%$, $6.96\%$, $2.71\%$, and $2.29\%$, and the MAPE of GSA-KAN is reduced by $6.66\%$, $5.88\%$, $6.41\%$, and $4.87\%$ on the A1, A2, A4, and A8 datasets, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that GSA-KAN performs advanced parametric and nonparametric models.

Reliable forecasting of short-term traffic flow is an essential component of modern intelligent transport systems. However, existing methods fail to deal with the non-linear nature of short-term traffic flow, often making the forecasting unreliable. Herein, we propose a reliable short-term traffic flow forecasting method, termed hybrid extreme learning, that effectively learns the non-linear representation of traffic flow, boosting forecasting reliability. This new algorithm probes the non-linear nature of short-term traffic data by exploiting the artificial bee colony that selects the best-implied layer deviation and input weight matrix to enhance the multi-structural information perception capability. It speeds up the forecasting time by calculating the output weight matrix, which guarantees the real usage of the forecasting method, boosting the time reliability. We extensively evaluate the proposed hybrid extreme learning method on well-known short-term traffic flow forecasting datasets. The experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both forecasting accuracy and time, effectively demonstrating the reliability improvement of the proposed method. This reliable method may open the avenue of deep learning techniques in short-term traffic flow forecasting in real scenarios.