Statistical analysis and predictability of inter-urban highway traffic flows: a case study in Heilongjiang Province, China

Abstract

In this study, the statistical properties and predictability of inter-urban highway traffic flows are investigated in a practical case in Heilongjiang Province, China. We build a topology graph of the inter-urban highway traffic flows and analyze its topological structure using the degree distribution. The production and the attraction of traffic zones have a high level of heterogeneity and are strongly correlated with the topology of the inter-urban highway traffic flows. We present the probability distributions of the inter-urban highway traffic and travel distances, which can be fitted by a power-law function and a two-term Gaussian model, respectively. We also present four prediction models for the inter-urban highway traffic flows. The first three models are existing models, namely the gravity model, radiation model, and population-weighted opportunities model. The fourth is a novel multifactor-weighted benefits model that considers population, GDP, and area. We also introduce the concept of the breakthrough threshold to make our model more accurate. A comparative study shows that our model is more suitable for predicting the inter-urban highway traffic flows than the other three models, whether predicting accuracy, cost, or efficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-urban traffic
• Zipf’s law
• prediction model
• highway network

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71901056, 51638004) and the General Project of Humanities and Social Sciences Research by the Ministry of Education of China (19YJCZH052).