Analysis of Recurrent Neural Networks for Probabilistic Modeling of Driver Behavior

The validity of any traffic simulation model depends on its ability to generate representative driver acceleration profiles. This paper studies the effectiveness of recurrent neural networks in predicting the acceleration distributions for car following on highways. The long short-term memory recurrent networks are trained and used to propagate the simulated vehicle trajectories over 10-s horizons. On the basis of several performance metrics, the recurrent networks are shown to generally match or outperform baseline methods in replicating driver behavior, including smoothness and oscillatory characteristics present in real trajectories. This paper reveals that the strong performance is due to the ability of the recurrent network to identify recent trends in the ego-vehicle's state, and recurrent networks are shown to perform as, well as feedforward networks with longer histories as inputs.