Supervisor

Naila Aslam

Programme

MSc in Data Analytics

Subject

Computer Science

Abstract

Accurate traffic congestion prediction is essential for effective urban mobility and energy-efficient transport planning. This study evaluates the impact of optimizers on ConvLSTM models for short-term traffic forecasting using the METR-LA dataset, incorporating weather and event data as exogenous features. Two optimizers—Adam and Nesterov-accelerated Lookahead (NALA)—are compared under a frozen-T evaluation to prevent temporal leakage. Data preprocessing included five-minute alignment of weather data and event integration based on sensor proximity. Results show that the best-performing model (Variant C-2), integrating traffic, weather, and event features with reduced dropout and NALA optimization, achieved an MAE of 5.22 and RMSE of 8.79, outperforming traffic-only and traffic-plus-weather baselines. Findings highlight NALA’s potential for improved convergence and demonstrate the value of exogenous features in enhancing traffic forecasting accuracy.

Date of Award

2025

Full Publication Date

2025

Access Rights

open access

Document Type

Capstone Project

Resource Type

thesis

Included in

Data Science Commons

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