SSA-ELM: A Hybrid Learning Model for Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting

Nowadays, accurate and efficient short-term traffic flow forecasting plays a critical role in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, due to the fact that traffic flow is susceptible to factors such as weather and road conditions, traffic flow data tend to exhibit dynamic uncertainty and nonlinearity, making the construction of a robust and reliable forecasting model still a challenging task. Aiming at this nonlinear and complex traffic flow forecasting problem, this paper constructs a short-term traffic flow forecasting hybrid optimization model, SSA-ELM, based on extreme learning machine by embedding the sparrow search algorithm in order to solve the above problem. Extreme learning machine has been widely used in short-term traffic flow forecasting due to its characteristics such as low computational complexity and fast learning speed. By using the sparrow search algorithm to optimize the input weight values and hidden layer deviations in the extreme learning machine, the sparrow search algorithm is utilized to search for the global optimal solution while taking into account the original characteristics of the extreme learning machine, so that the model improves stability while increasing prediction accuracy. Experimental results on the Amsterdam A10 road traffic flow dataset show that the traffic flow forecasting model proposed in this paper has higher forecasting accuracy and stability, revealing the potential of hybrid optimization models in the field of short-term traffic flow forecasting.