TrafficWave: Generative deep learning architecture for vehicular traffic flow prediction

Vehicular traffic flow prediction for a specific day of the week in a specific time span is valuable information. Local police can use this information to preventively control the traffic in more critical areas and improve the viability by decreasing, also, the number of accidents. In this paper, a novel generative deep learning architecture for time series analysis, inspired by the Google DeepMind' Wavenet network, called TrafficWave, is proposed and applied to traffic prediction problem. The technique is compared with the most performing state-of-the-art approaches: stacked auto encoders, long-short term memory and gated recurrent unit. Results show that the proposed system performs a valuable MAPE error rate reduction when compared with other state of art techniques.