Traffic Data Reconstruction via Adaptive Spatial-Temporal Correlations

Data missing remains a difficult and important problem in the transportation information system, which seriously restricts the application of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), dominatingly on traffic monitoring, e.g., traffic data collection, traffic state estimation, and traffic control. Numerous traffic data imputation methods had been proposed in the last decade. However, lacking of sufficient temporal variation characteristic analysis as well as spatial correlation measurements leads to limited completion precision, and poses a major challenge for an ITS. Leveraging the low-rank nature and the spatial-temporal correlation of traffic network data, this paper proposes a novel approach to reconstruct the missing traffic data based on low-rank matrix factorization, which elaborates the potential implications of the traffic matrix by decomposed factor matrices. To further exploit the temporal evolvement characteristics and the spatial similarity of road links, we design a time-series constraint and an adaptive Laplacian regularization spatial constraint to explore the local relationship with road links. The experimental results on six real-world traffic data sets show that our approach outperforms the other methods and can successfully reconstruct the road traffic data precisely for various structural loss modes.