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Outlier Detection in Urban Traffic Flow Distributions

Urban traffic data consists of observations like number and speed of cars or other vehicles at certain locations as measured by deployed sensors. These numbers can be interpreted as traffic flow which in turn relates to the capacity of streets and the demand of the traffic system. City planners are interested in studying the impact of various conditions on the traffic flow, leading to unusual patterns, i.e., outliers. Existing approaches to outlier detection in urban traffic data take into account only individual flow values (i.e., an individual observation). This can be interesting for real time detection of sudden changes. Here, we face a different scenario: The city planners want to learn from historical data, how special circumstances (e.g., events or festivals) relate to unusual patterns in the traffic flow, in order to support improved planing of both, events and the layout of the traffic system. Therefore, we propose to consider the sequence of traffic flow values observed within some time interval. Such flow sequences can be modeled as probability distributions of flows. We adapt an established outlier detection method, the local outlier factor (LOF), to handling flow distributions rather than individual observations. We apply the outlier detection online to extend the database with new flow distributions that are considered inliers. For the validation we consider a special case of our framework for comparison with state-of-the-art outlier detection on flows. In addition, a real case study on urban traffic flow data showcases that our method finds meaningful outliers in the traffic flow data.