Accurate and reliable traffic flow forecasting is of importance for urban planning and mitigation of traffic congestion, and it is also the basis for the deployment of intelligent traffic management systems. However, constructing a reasonable and robust forecasting model is a challenging task due to the uncertainties and nonlinear characteristics of traffic flow. Aiming at the nonlinear relationship affecting traffic flow forecasting effect, a PSO-ELM model based on particle swarm optimization is proposed for short-term traffic flow forecasting, which takes the advantages of particle swarm optimization to search global optimal solution and extreme learning machine to fast deal with the nonlinear relationship. The proposed model improves the accuracy of traffic flow forecasting. The traffic flow data from highways A1, A2, A4, A8 connecting to Amsterdam’s ring road are employed for the case study. The RMSEs of PSO-ELM model are respectively 252.61, 173.75, 200.24, 146.05, while the MAPEs of PSO-ELM model are respectively 11.86%, 10.10%, 10.74%, 11.60%. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposal is significantly better than the performance of state-of-the-art models.

Short‐term traffic flow forecasting is a fundamental and challenging task since it is required for the successful deployment of intelligent transportation systems and the traffic flow is dramatically changing through time. This study presents a novel hybrid dual Kalman filter (H‐KF ² ) for accurate and timely short‐term traffic flow forecasting. To achieve this, the H‐KF ² first models the propagation of the discrepancy between the predictions of the traditional Kalman filter and the random walk model. By estimating the a posteriori state of the prediction errors of both models, the calibrated discrepancy is exploited to compensate the preliminary predictions. The H‐KF ² works with competitive time and space to traditional Kalman filter. Four real‐world datasets and various experiments are employed to evaluate the authors’ model. The experimental results demonstrate the H‐KF ² outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art parametric and non‐parametric models.