IDENTIFICATION FOR CHAOTIC PHENOMENA IN SHORT-TERM TRAFFIC FLOWS: A PARSIMONY PROCEDURE WITH SURROGATE DATA

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a parsimony procedure to identify if chaotic phenomena exist in a traffic flow dynamics. A wide-ranging comparison of geometric plots and statistics between the observed one-minute traffic data and their surrogates are carried out. The most crucial indexes are selected to establish the parsimony testing procedure, which are successfully validated by known time series data generators and further applied to identification for chaotic traffic time series. We have strong evidence to conclude that chaotic phenomena, rather than random structures, do exist in the nature of freeway short-term (one-minute) traffic during the morning hours.