  Short-term traffic flow prediction is one of the crucial issues in
intelligent transportation system, which is an important part of smart cities.
Accurate predictions can enable both the drivers and the passengers to make
better decisions about their travel route, departure time and travel origin
selection, which can be helpful in traffic management. Multiple models and
algorithms based on time series prediction and machine learning were applied to
this issue and achieved acceptable results. Recently, the availability of
sufficient data and computational power, motivates us to improve the prediction
accuracy via deep-learning approaches. Recurrent neural networks have become
one of the most popular methods for time series forecasting, however, due to
the variety of these networks, the question that which type is the most
appropriate one for this task remains unsolved. In this paper, we use three
kinds of recurrent neural networks including simple RNN units, GRU and LSTM
neural network to predict short-term traffic flow. The dataset from TAP30
Corporation is used for building the models and comparing RNNs with several
well-known models, such as DEMA, LASSO and XGBoost. The results show that all
three types of RNNs outperform the others, however, more simple RNNs such as
simple recurrent units and GRU perform work better than LSTM in terms of
accuracy and training time.

Machine Learning;Machine Learning