Short term traffic flow prediction with particle methods in the presence of sparse data

Traffic prediction approaches face challenges when presented with sparse or missing data. This can be caused by numerous factors such as: i) sensors not being operational; ii) communication issues; iii) cost prohibiting full monitoring of a road network. This present work adds to existing body of knowledge by proposing a particle based framework for dealing with these challenges. An expression of the likelihood function is derived for the case when the missing value is calculated based on Kriging interpolation. With the Kriging interpolation, the missing values of the measurements are predicted, which are subsequently used in the computation of likelihood terms in the particle filter algorithm. The results show 23% to 36.34% improvement in RMSE values for the synthetic data used.