Hourly Origin–Destination Matrix Estimation Using Intelligent Transportation Systems Data and Deep Learning

Predicting the travel demand plays an indispensable role in urban transportation planning. Data collection methods for estimating the origin–destination (OD) demand matrix are being extensively shifted from traditional survey techniques to the pre-collected data from intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). This shift is partly due to the high cost of conducting traditional surveys and partly due to the diversity of scattered data produced by ITSs and the opportunity to derive extra benefits out of this big data. This study attempts to predict the OD matrix of Tehran metropolis using a set of ITS data, including the data extracted from automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, smart fare cards, loop detectors at intersections, global positioning systems (GPS) of navigation software, socio-economic and demographic characteristics as well as land-use features of zones. For this purpose, five models based on machine learning (ML) techniques are developed for training and test. In evaluating the performance of the models, the statistical methods show that the convolutional neural network (CNN) leads to the best performance in terms of accuracy in predicting the OD matrix and has the lowest error in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Moreover, the predicted OD matrix was structurally compared with the ground truth matrix, and the CNN model also shows the highest structural similarity with the ground truth OD matrix in the presented case.