Statistical analysis and predictability of inter-urban highway traffic flows: a case study in Heilongjiang Province, China

In this study, the statistical properties and predictability of inter-urban highway traffic flows are investigated in a practical case in Heilongjiang Province, China. We build a topology graph of the inter-urban highway traffic flows and analyze its topological structure using the degree distribution. The production and the attraction of traffic zones have a high level of heterogeneity and are strongly correlated with the topology of the inter-urban highway traffic flows. We present the probability distributions of the inter-urban highway traffic and travel distances, which can be fitted by a power-law function and a two-term Gaussian model, respectively. We also present four prediction models for the inter-urban highway traffic flows. The first three models are existing models, namely the gravity model, radiation model, and population-weighted opportunities model. The fourth is a novel multifactor-weighted benefits model that considers population, GDP, and area. We also introduce the concept of the breakthrough threshold to make our model more accurate. A comparative study shows that our model is more suitable for predicting the inter-urban highway traffic flows than the other three models, whether predicting accuracy, cost, or efficiency.