Short-term travel time prediction is an essential input to intelligent transportation systems. Timely and accurate traffic forecasting is necessary for advanced traffic management systems and advanced traveler information systems. Despite several short-term travel time prediction approaches have been proposed in the past decade, especially for hybrid models that consist of machine learning models and statistical models, few studies focus on the over-fitting problem brought by hybrid models. The over-fitting problem deteriorates the prediction accuracy especially during peak hours. This paper proposes a hybrid model that embraces wavelet neural network (WNN), Markov chain (MAR), and the volatility (VOA) model for short-term travel time prediction in a freeway system. The purpose of this paper is to provide deeper insights into underlining dynamic traffic patterns and to improve the prediction accuracy and robustness. The method takes periodical analysis, error correction, and noise extraction into consideration and improve the forecasting performance in peak hours. The proposed methodology predicts travel time by decomposing travel time data into three components: a periodic trend presented by a modified WNN, a residual part modeled by Markov chain, and the volatility part estimated by the modified generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model. Forecasting performance is investigated with freeway travel time data from Houston, Texas and examined by three measures: mean absolute error, mean absolute percentage error, and root mean square error. The results show that the travel times predicted by the WNN-MAR-VOA method are robust and accurate. Meanwhile, the proposed method is able to capture the underlying periodic characteristics and volatility nature of travel time data.

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