Data-driven transport modelling without overfit
For transport planners and modellers, it offers a cheaper, more reliable alternative to survey-based models with reduced overfitting risk.
The paper presents a data-driven transport modelling protocol that uses traffic counts as objective function, avoiding overfitting and improving interpretability over traditional survey-based methods. It demonstrates the approach on toy and realistic examples, showing controlled complexity and accuracy gains.
Macroscopic transport modelling aims to predict traffic flows after proposed public policy interventions, such as a new road or railway section or a temporary road closure. As such, it is a vital step in infrastructure planning and development. Traditionally, building a transport model has relied on complex understanding of socio-economic characteristics of the population requiring expensive data collection via surveys, which are prone to biases. Previous numerical frameworks to optimize transport models to fit observed traffic flows are not easily-interpretable and can lead to overfit. We present here an alternative: a data-driven modelling protocol with objective function based on traffic counts, which can be nowadays cheaply and reliably obtained; explainable model weights; and a controlled path to increase model complexity and accuracy. We demonstrate our approach on several toy and realistic examples, and suggest ways to generalize to multimodal systems including public transport.