A Long-Term Traffic Flow Prediction Model Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and Auto-Correlation Mechanism

Traffic flow forecasting, as an integral part of intelligent transportation systems, plays a critical part in traffic planning. Previous studies have primarily focused on short-term traffic flow prediction, paying insufficient attention to long-term prediction. In this study, we propose a hybrid model that utilizes variational mode decomposition (VMD) and the auto-correlation mechanism for long-term prediction. In view of the periodic and stochastic characteristics of traffic flow, VMD is able to decompose the data into intrinsic mode functions with different frequencies, which in turn helps the model extract the internal features of the data and better capture the changes of traffic flow data in the cycle. Additionally, we improve the residual structure by adding a convolutional layer to propose a correction module and use it together with the auto-correlation mechanism to jointly build an encoder and decoder to extract features from different data components (intrinsic mode functions) and fuse the extracted features for output. To meet the requirements of long-term forecasting, we set the traffic flow forecast length to 4 levels: 96, 192, 336, and 720. We validated our model using the departure statistics dataset of a taxi parking lot at Beijing Capital International Airport and achieved the best prediction performance in terms of mean squared error and mean absolute error, compared to the baseline model.