MFOA-Bi-LSTM: An optimized bidirectional long short-term memory model for short-term traffic flow prediction

Within Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), modeling of traffic flow assumes a pivotal role, as it is crucial for alleviating traffic congestion and reducing carbon emissions. Developing a reliable and sustainable model for predicting traffic flow is highly challenging due to the fluctuations and nonlinear characteristics of traffic flow. In addition to being a practical problem, accurately forecasting traffic flow provides substantial challenges to the researchers working in this area. The aim of this study is to develop a complex framework for forecasting short-term traffic flow with the purpose of improving prediction accuracy. In order to attain this goal, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model with a Modified Firefly Optimization Algorithm (MFOA) known as MFOA-Bi-LSTM has been proposed. The MFOA optimization technique has been utilized to optimize the hyperparameters of the deep learning models. Moreover, the optimization of the Bi-LSTM network prediction model is achieved through the application of the MFOA technique, which is renowned for its ability to converge quickly, maintain robustness and perform extensive global searches. To better capture complex patterns in the input data and increase prediction accuracy, model’s architecture makes use of the bidirectional capabilities of Bi-LSTM layers. This combination of Bi-LSTM and FOA is proposed for optimizing complex sequence modeling tasks where selecting the right hyperparameters for the model is challenging and it allows for automated hyperparameter tuning and often leads to improved model performance. In terms of performance metrics including Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Correlation Coefficient (r), the proposed model significantly outperforms the other selected models and study findings confirm its appropriateness for the predictive task.