Classifying the traffic state of urban expressways: A machine-learning approach

The classification of the urban traffic state and its application is an important part of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which can not only help traffic managers grasp the traffic operation situation and analyze congestion, but also provide travelers with more traffic information and help them avoid congestion. Thus, an accurate traffic state classification method would be very practical for urban traffic management. The primary objective of this study is to classify the urban traffic state using a machine-learning method (i.e., the FCM clustering method, and the classification results can be determined from the corresponding clustering labels). In this approach, two parts are developed. First, a new classification indicator, i.e., the ample degree of road network is proposed, and it will make up a comprehensive classification indicator system with other parameters such as traffic flow, speed and occupancy. Then, the traditional fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering approach is improved in two regards, i.e., the fuzzy membership function improvement and weighting processing of the samples, and these improvements can enhance the clustering performance. As a result, an improved machine-learning method (i.e., the improved FCM clustering approach) is developed and used to conduct the clustering analysis with real-world traffic flow data. Next, a case study of Shanghai is used to guide the study process, which consists of data processing, clustering analysis and method comparison. The other methods (e.g., the support vector machines (SVM) method, the decision tree method, the k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) method and the traditional FCM clustering approach) are introduced to compare with the improved FCM clustering approach. The discussion shows the superiority of the proposed method (e.g., compared with the traditional FCM clustering approach, the objective function value of the improved method decreased by 31.11%, and cluster center error also show a descending trend), and it outperforms the other methods in classification performance (e.g., the overall classification accuracy of the improved FCM method increased by 10.10%, 5.45%, 30.92% and 35.66% in comparison with the traditional FCM method, SVM method, decision tree method and KNN method, respectively). Additionally, the NMI, ROC curve results also illustrated the superiority of the improved FCM method to other methods. These comaprison results suggest that the improved FCM clustering approach is feasible and the results can be well used in the advanced traffic management system, which may have the potential to serve as a reference for releasing accurate traffic state information and preventing traffic congestion and risk.