Collective Traffic Prediction with Partially Observed Traffic History using Location-Based Social Media

Traffic prediction has become an important and active research topic in the last decade. Existing solutions mainly focus on exploiting the past and current traffic data, collected from various kinds of sensors, such as loop detectors, GPS devices, etc. In real-world road systems, only a small fraction of the road segments are deployed with sensors. For all the other road segments without sensors or historical traffic data, previous methods may no longer work. In this paper, we propose to use location-based social media, which captures a much larger area of the road systems than deployed sensors, to predict the traffic conditions. A simple but effective method called CTP is proposed to incorporate location-based social media semantics into the learning process. CTP also exploits complex dependencies among different regions to improve the prediction performances through collective inference. Empirical studies using traffic data and tweets collected in Los Angeles area demonstrate the effectiveness of CTP.