An Integrated Fuzzy C-Means Method for Missing Data Imputation Using Taxi GPS Data

Various traffic-sensing technologies have been employed to facilitate traffic control. Due to certain factors, e.g., malfunctioning devices and artificial mistakes, missing values typically occur in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) sensing datasets, resulting in a decrease in the data quality. In this study, an integrated imputation algorithm based on fuzzy C-means (FCM) and the genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to improve the accuracy of the estimated values. The GA is applied to optimize the parameter of the membership degree and the number of cluster centroids in the FCM model. An experimental test of the taxi global positioning system (GPS) data in Manhattan, New York City, is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated imputation approach. Three evaluation criteria, the root mean squared error (RMSE), correlation coefficient (R), and relative accuracy (RA), are used to verify the experimental results. Under the ±5% and ±10% thresholds, the average RAs obtained by the integrated imputation method are 0.576 and 0.785, which remain the highest among different methods, indicating that the integrated imputation method outperforms the history imputation method and the conventional FCM method. On the other hand, the clustering imputation performance with the Euclidean distance is better than that with the Manhattan distance. Thus, our proposed integrated imputation method can be employed to estimate the missing values in the daily traffic management.