A distributed WND-LSTM model on MapReduce for short-term traffic flow prediction

Building data-driven intelligent transportation is a significant task for establishing data-centric smart cities, and exceptionally efficient and accurate traffic flow prediction (TFP) is a crucial technology in constructing intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). To address the computation and storage problems of processing traffic flow big data with the centralized model on a traditional mining platform, we propose a distributed long short-term memory weighted model combined with a time window and normal distribution based on a MapReduce parallel processing framework in this paper, named as WND-LSTM. More specifically, under the Hadoop distributed computing platform, a distributed modeling framework of forecasting traffic flow on MapReduce is developed to solve the existing issues of storage and calculation in handling large-scale traffic flow data with the stand-alone learning model. Moreover, a distributed WND-LSTM model is presented on the MapReduce-based distributed modeling framework to enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and scalability of short-term TFP. Finally, we forecast the traffic flow on the Sanlihe East Road of Beijing in China using the proposed WND-LSTM model with the real-world taxi trajectory big data. In particular, the extensively experimental results from a case study demonstrate that the MAPE value of WND-LSTM is 88.48%, 65.79%, 70.46%, 68.21%, 66.95%, 68.43%, and 70.41% lower than that of the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), logistical regression (LR), support vector regression (SVR), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), stacked autoencoders (SAEs), gated recurrent unit (GRU), and long short-term memory (LSTM), respectively, and achieves 71.25% accuracy improvement on average.