GRU‐CNN Neural Network Method for Regional Traffic Congestion Prediction Serving Traffic Diversion Demand

Predicting spatiotemporal congestion situations of a traffic network is a prerequisite for urban traffic control. This study proposes a spatiotemporal traffic congestion situation prediction method based on the recurrent gated unit‐convolutional neural network (GRU‐CNN). Considering the time and space attributes of traffic data, the third‐order tensor of the traffic data is extracted from the time domain, and the GRU is used to predict the traffic flow parameters of the traffic network. Then, the third‐order tensor of multisource spatiotemporal traffic data is compressed into traffic data images and combined with the spatial structure. The feature extraction technology of a CNN is used to extract and identify the traffic network congestion features. Actual urban traffic network data are selected for model verification. The multistep prediction of the traffic flow parameters effectively ensures prediction accuracy. The proposed model is trained by the actual classification dataset. The prediction results of the test set demonstrate the model’s reliability. Based on predicting the traffic parameters of the network, this model can give a highly accurate judgment of the traffic situation for the entire network. Compared with other models, the proposed model further improves the accuracy of road network traffic state discrimination and has better robustness.