Anomaly detection for non-recurring traffic congestions using Long short-term memory networks (LSTMs)

Abstract: In this master thesis, we implement a two-step anomaly detection mechanism for non-recurrent traffic congestions with data collected from public transport buses in Stockholm. We investigate the use of machine learning to model time series data with LSTMs and evaluate the results with a baseline prediction model. The anomaly detection algorithm embodies both collective and contextual expressivity, meaning it is capable of findingcollections of delayed buses and also takes the temporality of the data into account. Results show that the anomaly detection performance benefits from the lower prediction errors produced by the LSTM network. The intersection rule significantly decreases the number of false positives while maintaining the true positive rate at a sufficient level. The performance of the anomaly detection algorithm has been found to depend on the road segment it is applied to, some segments have been identified to be particularly hard whereas other have been identified to be easier than others. The performance of the best performing setup of the anomaly detection mechanism had a true positive rate of 84.3 % and a true negative rate of 96.0 %.