Interpretable long-term traffic modelling on national road networks using theory-informed deep learning
Long-term traffic modelling is fundamental to transport planning, but existing approaches often trade off interpretability, transferability, and predictive accuracy. Classical travel demand models provide behavioural structure but rely on strong assumptions and extensive calibration, whereas generic deep learning models capture complex patterns but often lack theoretical grounding and spatial transferability, limiting their usefulness for long-term planning applications. We propose DeepDemand, a theory-informed deep learning framework that embeds key components of travel demand theory to predict long-term highway traffic volumes using external socioeconomic features and road-network structure. The framework integrates a competitive two-source Dijkstra procedure for local origin-destination (OD) region extraction and OD pair screening with a differentiable architecture modelling OD interactions and travel-time deterrence. The model is evaluated using eight years (2017-2024) of observations on the UK strategic road network, covering 5088 highway segments. Under random cross-validation, DeepDemand achieves an R2 of 0.718 and an MAE of 7406 vehicles, outperforming linear, ridge, random forest, and gravity-style baselines. Performance remains strong under spatial cross-validation (R2 = 0.665), indicating good geographic transferability. Interpretability analysis reveals a stable nonlinear travel-time deterrence pattern, key socioeconomic drivers of demand, and polycentric OD interaction structures aligned with major employment centres and transport hubs. These results highlight the value of integrating transport theory with deep learning for interpretable highway traffic modelling and practical planning applications.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Using an interpretable Machine Learning approach to study the drivers of International Migration
Globally increasing migration pressures call for new modelling approaches in order to design effective policies. It is important to have not only efficient models to predict migration flows but also to understand how spe…
BIG-bench Machine LearningFeature ImportanceInterpretable Machine LearningData-driven transport modelling without overfit
Macroscopic transport modelling aims to predict traffic flows after proposed public policy interventions, such as a new road or railway section or a temporary road closure. As such, it is a vital step in infrastructure p…
MSTIM: A MindSpore-Based Model for Traffic Flow Prediction
Aiming at the problems of low accuracy and large error fluctuation of traditional traffic flow predictionmodels when dealing with multi-scale temporal features and dynamic change patterns. this paperproposes a multi-scal…
Microscopic Vehicle Trajectory Datasets from UAV-collected Video for Heterogeneous, Area-Based Urban Traffic
This paper offers openly available microscopic vehicle trajectory (MVT) datasets collected using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in heterogeneous, area-based urban traffic conditions. Traditional roadside video collectio…
On model selection for scalable time series forecasting in transport networks
The transport literature is dense regarding short-term traffic predictions, up to the scale of 1 hour, yet less dense for long-term traffic predictions. The transport literature is also sparse when it comes to city-scale…
ClusteringDeep LearningModel SelectionRecommendation Systems+4