Non-recurrent Traffic Congestion Detection with a Coupled Scalable Bayesian Robust Tensor Factorization Model

Abstract

Non-recurrent traffic congestion (NRTC) usually brings unexpected delays to commuters. Hence, it is critical to accurately detect and recognize the NRTC in a real-time manner. The advancement of road traffic detectors and loop detectors provides researchers with a large-scale multivariable temporal-spatial traffic data, which allows the deep research on NRTC to be conducted. However, it remains a challenging task to construct an analytical framework through which the natural spatial-temporal structural properties of multivariable traffic information can be effectively represented and exploited to better understand and detect NRTC. In this paper, we present a novel analytical training-free framework based on coupled scalable Bayesian robust tensor factorization (Coupled SBRTF). The framework can couple multivariable traffic data including traffic flow, road speed, and occupancy through sharing a similar or the same sparse structure. And, it naturally captures the high-dimensional spatial-temporal structural properties of traffic data by tensor factorization. With its entries revealing the distribution and magnitude of NRTC, the shared sparse structure of the framework compasses sufficiently abundant information about NRTC. While the low-rank part of the framework, expresses the distribution of general expected traffic condition as an auxiliary product. Experimental results on real-world traffic data show that the proposed method outperforms coupled Bayesian robust principal component analysis (coupled BRPCA), the rank sparsity tensor decomposition (RSTD), and standard normal deviates (SND) in detecting NRTC. The proposed method performs even better when only traffic data in weekdays are utilized, and hence can provide more precise estimation of NRTC for daily commuters.