Using principal curves to analyse traffic patterns on freeways.

Abstract

Scatterplots of traffic speed versus flow have caught considerable attention over the last decades due to their characteristic half-moon like shape. Modelling data of this type is difficult as both variables are actually not a function of each other in the sense of causality, but are rather jointly generated by a third latent variable, which is a monotone function of the traffic density. We propose local principal curves as a tool to describe and model speed-flow data, which takes this viewpoint into account. We introduce the concept of calibration curves to determine the relationship between the latent variable (represented by the parametrization of the principal curve) and the traffic density. We apply local principal curves to a variety of speed-flow diagrams from Californian freeways, including some so far unreported patterns