Imputation (statistics)

Missing data

Data mining

External Data Representation

Machine learning

Artificial intelligence

Synthetic data

Traffic generation model

Computer science

Real-time computing

Data modeling

Database

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Traffic data imputation is critical for both research and applications of intelligent transportation systems. To develop traffic data imputation models with high accuracy, traffic data must be large and diverse, which is costly. An alternative is to use synthetic traffic data, which is cheap and easy-access. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using parallel data and generative adversarial networks (GANs) to enhance traffic data imputation. Parallel data is a recently proposed method of using synthetic and real data for data mining and data-driven process, in which we apply GANs to generate synthetic traffic data. As it is difficult for the standard GAN algorithm to generate time-dependent traffic flow data, we made twofold modifications: 1) using the real data or the corrupted ones instead of random vectors as latent codes to generator within GANs and 2) introducing a representation loss to measure discrepancy between the synthetic data and the real data. The experimental results on a real traffic dataset demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the performance of traffic data imputation.

Traffic Flow Imputation Using Parallel Data and Generative Adversarial Networks