Road trafficking description and short term travel time forecasting, with a classification method

The purpose of this work is, on the one hand, to study how to forecast road trafficking on high-way networks and, on the other hand, to describe future traffic events. Here, road trafficking is measured by vehicle velocities. The authors propose two methodologies. The first is based on an empirical classification method, and the second on a probability mixture model. They use an SAEM-type algorithm (a stochastic approximation of the EM algorithm) to select the densities of the mixture model. Then, they test the validity of their methodologies by forecasting short term travel times.