Comparative Analysis of LSTM, ARIMA, and Facebook’s Prophet for Traffic Forecasting
Advancements, Challenges, and Limitations
T.Z. Üzel (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
E. Congeduti – Mentor (TU Delft - Computer Science & Engineering-Teaching Team)
George Iosifidis – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Networked Systems)
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Abstract
Accurate short-term traffic forecasting plays a crucial role in Intelligent Transportation Systems for effective traffic management and planning. In this study, the performances of three popular forecasting models are explored: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), and Facebook's Prophet, for short-term traffic prediction. The models were trained and evaluated using a dataset of traffic flow data collected from 161 detectors over a specific time period. The experimental results reveal that ARIMA outperformed LSTM and Prophet in terms of Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). This suggests that while deep learning methods, such as LSTM, are generally acknowledged to outperform ARIMA in short-term traffic forecasting, this study reveals that there are specific scenarios where such well-accepted fact needs to be tested.