A Double-Norm Aggregated Tensor Latent Factorization Model for Temporal-Aware Traffic Speed Imputation

Abstract: In intelligent transportation systems (ITS), traffic management departments rely on sensors, cameras, and GPS devices to collect real-time traffic data. Traffic speed data is often incomplete due to sensor failures, data transmission delays, or occlusions, resulting in missing speed data in certain road segments. Currently, tensor decomposition based methods are extensively utilized, they mostly rely on the $L_2$-norm to construct their learning objectives, which leads to reduced robustness in the algorithms. To address this, we propose Temporal-Aware Traffic Speed Imputation (TATSI), which combines the $L_2$-norm and smooth $L_1$ (${SL}_1$)-norm in its loss function, thereby achieving both high accuracy and robust performance in imputing missing time-varying traffic speed data. TATSI adopts a single latent factor-dependent, nonnegative, and multiplicative update (SLF-NMU) approach, which serves as an efficient solver for performing nonnegative latent factor analysis (LFA) on a tensor. Empirical studies on three real-world time-varying traffic speed datasets demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art traffic speed predictors, TATSI more precisely captures temporal patterns, thereby yielding the most accurate imputations for missing traffic speed data.