EPJ Data Sci. (2019) 8: 28
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0207-7

Regular article

Identifying the most influential roads based on traffic correlation networks

¹ State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, China
² Beijing PalmGo Infotech Co., Ltd, Beijing, China
³ School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China
⁴ National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering, Beijing, China
⁵ Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany
⁶ Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

^* e-mail: dongzhou@buaa.edu.cn

Received: 11 March 2019
Accepted: 3 September 2019
Published online: 18 September 2019

Abstract

Prediction of traffic congestion is one of the core issues in the realization of smart traffic. Accurate prediction depends on understanding of interactions and correlations between different city locations. While many methods merely consider the spatio-temporal correlation between two locations, here we propose a new approach of capturing the correlation network in a city based on realtime traffic data. We use the weighted degree and the impact distance as the two major measures to identify the most influential locations. A road segment with larger weighted degree or larger impact distance suggests that its traffic flow can strongly influence neighboring road sections driven by the congestion propagation. Using these indices, we find that the statistical properties of the identified correlation network is stable in different time periods during a day, including morning rush hours, evening rush hours, and the afternoon normal time respectively. Our work provides a new framework for assessing interactions between different local traffic flows. The captured correlation network between different locations might facilitate future studies on predicting and controlling the traffic flows.