Examining the Impact of Different Periodic Functions on Short-Term Freeway Travel Time Prediction Approaches

Freeway travel time prediction is a key technology of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Many scholars have found that periodic function plays a positive role in improving the prediction accuracy of travel time prediction models. However, very few studies have comprehensively evaluated the impacts of different periodic functions on statistical and machine learning models. In this paper, our primary objective is to evaluate the performance of the six commonly used multistep ahead travel time prediction models (three statistical models and three machine learning models). In addition, we compared the impacts of three periodic functions on multistep ahead travel time prediction for different temporal scales (5-minute, 10-minute, and 15-minute). The results indicate that the periodic functions can improve the prediction performance of machine learning models for more than 60 minutes ahead prediction and improve the over 30 minutes ahead prediction accuracy for statistical models. Three periodic functions show a slight difference in improving the prediction accuracy of the six prediction models. For the same prediction step, the effect of the periodic function is more obvious at a higher level of aggregation