2016 IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)
Windsor Oceanico Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 1-4, 2016
Mining Spatio-temporal Patterns of Congested Traffic in Urban
Areas from Traffic Sensor Data*
Ryo Inoue, Akihisa Miyashita, and Masatoshi Sugita
Abstract Road traffic condition in cities are complicated by
the daily, weekly, seasonally, and weather-induced traffic
demand fluctuations and the effects caused by the control of
traffic signals. Therefore, it is difficult to quantitatively analyze
typical traffic congestion patterns that are represented by the
time and place of occurrence, the process of propagation and
diminution, duration time, and many others. This study
proposed a method to enumerate traffic congestion patterns
from traffic sensor data based on frequent pattern mining
developed in information science to understand the present
situations of traffic congestion in cities. The feasibility and
effectiveness of the proposed method have been evaluated
through the analysis of typical congestion patterns using the
traffic sensor data in Okinawa, Japan.
I. INTRODUCTION
Traffic congestion is one of the most important issues in
cities worldwide because it causes economic loss resulting
from increase of travel time among others. To solve and
reduce its harmful effects, various measures were conducted
to monitor traffic conditions in real time. One of these
measures is the continuous observation by traffic sensors. The
observed data is not only for instantaneous use such as traffic
control and traffic information service but also for analyses of
long-term traffic conditions. Although the stored data does not
cover the entire traffic conditions in a city spatially as it is
limited only on the main roads, it has rich information in time
as it records the road traffic condition continuously and
frequently. It is a useful data for the analysis of road traffic
conditions, such as traffic congestion.
Road traffic condition in cities is complicated because of
daily, weekly, seasonally, and weather-induced traffic demand
fluctuations, various origindestination patterns of traffic
demand, and effects caused by the control of traffic signals
installed in cities. Therefore, it is difficult to quantitatively
analyze typical patterns of traffic congestion that are
represented by time and place of occurrence, duration time,
process of propagation and diminution, and many others.
Two main approaches have been proposed to analyze
traffic congestion patterns from traffic observation data. The
first approach applies the traffic flow theory developed in
traffic engineering; it analyzes flow characteristics at
bottlenecks in the networks [1][2], and identifies their
distribution [3]. The second applies the data mining technique
*Research supported by JSPS Kakenhi 26630233 and 15H04053.
R. Inoue is with the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku
University, Sendai, Japan. (Phone: +81-22-795-7478; e-mail: rinoue@
tohoku.ac.jp).
A. Miyashita is with the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku
University, Sendai, Japan. (e-mail: miyashita@plan.civil.tohoku. ac.jp).
M. Sugita is with Japan Road Traffic Information Center, Tokyo, Japan.
(e-mail: m_sugita@office.jartic.or.jp)
978-1-5090-1889-5/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE
developed in information science; it identifies the bottlenecks
[4], the impact of traffic incidents [5], and the relationships of
congestion among regions [6][7], junctions [8], and links
[9][10] by applying data mining methods to traffic sensor and
probe vehicle data.
Above all, Nguyen et al. [9][10] proposed to discover
patterns of propagation processes of traffic congestion that
occurs at bottlenecks and spreads out in the connected links
with time from traffic sensor data. It adopts the frequent
pattern mining [11] to identify the spatial areas where a series
of congestion occurred and the Dynamic Bayesian Network to
describe a transition process of congested links. It first judges
whether each link is congested at each moment from data, and
creates the sets of congested links that are spatio-temporally
connected. These sets, the input to the pattern mining, do not
have temporal information; therefore, this study does not
analyze spatio-temporal transition processes of congested
links at the data mining process.
This study focuses on data mining approach and constructs
a method to enumerate traffic congestion patterns from traffic
sensor data based on frequent pattern mining. The feasibility
and effectiveness of the proposed method are evaluated
through the analysis of typical congestion patterns using the
traffic sensor data in Okinawa, Japan.
II. FREQUENT PATTERN MINING
Frequent pattern mining is a method of extracting patterns
whose frequencies exceed the user-specified threshold from a
huge database. It is a tool for market basket analysis, which
identifies sets of items that are frequently bought together by
customers from the point of sale (POS) data. An item is a
minimum unit of analysis, and transactions, sets of items
bought together, are the input data.
Frequent pattern mining adopts support and
confidence as evaluation criteria of association rules. An
association rule is a co-occurring relationship of condition part
X and conclusion part Y, where X and Y are sets of items and
are disjoint. The support of rule is the ratio of the number of
transactions in which all items in X and Y are included to the
number of all transactions. The rule is frequent if its support
exceeds the minimum support threshold. The confidence of
rule corresponds to the conditional probability; it is a ratio of
the number of transactions that contains all items in X and Y
over the number of transactions that contains all items in X.
The rule is judged strong if its confidence exceeds the
user-specified minimum confidence threshold.
This section explains the FP-Growth algorithm, which is
one of the fastest frequent pattern mining algorithms [12]. The
algorithm lists frequent patterns efficiently using the tree
structure called FP-Tree.
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A. FP-Tree TABLE I. SAMPLE TRANSACTION DATA.

FP-Tree is a tree data structure that stores transaction data Transaction ID Item IDs Transaction ID Item IDs
in compact size. The FP-tree is specialized in frequent pattern 1 b, c 6 a, c, e
search. It reduces data volume by excluding items that do not 2 b, d 7 b, c
3 a, b, e 8 a, c, e
fulfill minimum support condition and by aggregating 4 a, b 9 a, b, c
transactions that contain the same sets of items. FP-Tree 5 a, b, c, e 10 f
construction procedure is explained in the transactions shown
in Table I and the minimum support is set at 20%.
Item ID Count
First, a list is compiled in which all items are sorted in b 7
descending order of their frequencies (Fig. 1), and search a 6 b:7 a:2
items whose frequencies are larger than the minimum support. c 6
e 4 c:2
Items d and f do not fulfill the condition and do not form any c:2 a:4
d 1
frequent patterns; therefore, they were excluded from further f 1 e:2
procedures. Second, items in each transaction were sorted in e:1 c:2
the order of itemlist, and an FP-Tree was constructed as shown
in Fig. 1. Each node has three attributes: item ID, item count, e:1
and pointer. The item ID registers the item represented by the
node, Item count registers the number of transactions Figure 1. Itemlist and FP-Tree.
represented by the path reaching this node, and pointer links to
the next node in the FP-Tree with the same item ID, or null if TABLE II. TRANSACTIONS INCLUDE CPB {E}.
there is none. Sets of Items Count
b, a 1
The FP-Tree contains complete information for mining b, a, c 1
frequent patterns from transactions. For example, transactions a, c 2
that include item e are recorded on the paths from the root to
nodes of item e. Four transactions have item e: one transaction
with items b, a, and e, one transaction with items b, a, c, and e,
and two transactions with items a, c, and e. Item ID Count
a 4 a:4
The FP-tree compresses its data size by aggregating c 3
information of transactions with the same items. An efficient b 2 b:1 c:3
FP-tree with fewer data size is created when more frequent
items are placed closer to the root node. b:1
B. FP-Growth Algorithm Figure 2. Itemlist and conditional FP-Tree regarding CPB {e}.
The FP-Growth algorithm is a recursive algorithm
composed of following procedures. III. EXTRACTION OF CONGESTION PATTERNS BY EXTENDING
1. Select an item in order from the bottom of itemlist, and FREQUENT PATTERN MINING ALGORITHM
add it to the set of items of the conditional pattern-base (CPB). Suppose that dataset on congested links at each time for
multiple days are given. This study aims to extract congestion
2. Search transactions that include the added item to the
patterns that occur repeatedly in multiple days and represent
CPB from the FP-Tree. It is only required to consider items in
the propagation processes of traffic congestion from
the path from the root to a node of the item added to CPB,
bottlenecks to neighbor roads. It searches sets of congested
because the items adding to CPB are selected in order from the
links that are spatially connected and temporally continuous.
bottom of itemlist. Form the list of items whose frequency
exceeds the minimum support, and extract frequent patterns. An item is defined as a state in which congestion occurs on
a link at a period of time. A transaction is defined as a set of
3. Construct the conditional FP-Tree from the selected
items in a day. Then, frequent pattern mining can extract
transactions at the second process.
congestion patterns. However, the result includes unnecessary
An example of the procedure is shown here. First, item e patterns in which congested links are not connected with each
was selected, which was the least frequent item that satisfies other or the times of congestion occurrence are not continuous.
the minimum support condition, and added to the CPB; since The extraction of unnecessary patterns reduces the feasibility
the CPB is the null set at first, then it is updated to {e}. Next, of analysis. Therefore, it is essential to develop methods that
the transactions that include item e from the FP-Tree in Fig. 1. extract frequent patterns effectively.
were searched as shown in Table II, and the frequencies of
This section explains two extensions to extract congestion
other items were counted, forming an itemlist in Fig. 2. As
patterns efficiently.
items a, b, and c satisfy the minimum support condition,
itemsets {a, e}, {b, e}, {c, e} were extracted as frequent A. Extraction of Congestion Patterns that are Spatially
patterns. Then, the conditional FP-Tree is constructed when Connected and Temporally Continuous
the CPB is{e} from Table II. The recursive operation of
This study proposes an extension of FP-Growth algorithm
procedures to the conditional FP-tree in Fig. 2 can enumerate
by limiting a range of pattern search in itemsets configured by
all frequent patterns that include item e.
connected items. As discussed previously, the original

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FP-Growth algorithm searches an item whose count exceeds
the given minimum support value from conditional FP-tree. If
an item is found, the union of the item and the CPB are taken
as one of the frequent items. If the connectivity of items is
tested at this stage, the extraction of unnecessary patterns can
be avoided. If all items recorded in an FP-tree have no
connection with the items in the CPB, there is no need to
search the patterns from the tree. However, if there are items
that have connectivity in an FP-tree, transactions related to the
items should be extracted from the tree. As FP-Growth
algorithm extracts transaction data tracing nodes from leaf to
root in the FP-tree, it is convenient to place items that have
connectivity to the items in CPB close to leaf nodes. The
original algorithm arranges items in descending order of
frequency and constructs an FP-tree by placing items from the
root node. This study proposes to first arrange the items
without connectivity to items in CPB, then the items with
connectivity, and construct the FP-tree in the same procedure
of the original algorithm.
This simple expansion limits the search range and makes
the analysis more efficient compared with FP-Growth
algorithm.
B. Closed Pattern Search through Aggregation of Frequent
Itemset
In urban areas, traffic congestion is a daily occurrence at
the same bottleneck and time. Thus, some itemsets are
observed to have extremely high ratio in the data. For instance,
some combinations of connected links are always congested at
the same time and some links are congested at regular time
during the day. When analyzing the congestion that continues
for a long time and expands to a wide area, it is necessary to
analyze patterns that consist of many items that stand for
congested links at a certain time. Frequent pattern mining
enumerates all subsets in frequent patterns. The subsets of a
pattern increase exponentially if the number of items in a
pattern increases; therefore, it spoils the feasibility of analysis.
This study aggregates itemsets that appear frequently and
simultaneously in preprocessing to solve this issue. This is
expected to reduce the enumeration of subset patterns and
calculation time. This study adopts confidence for the
evaluation of itemsets to be aggregated. The minimum
confidence value is calculated by setting the condition part by
each single item of the itemsets individually, and aggregate if
the minimum value exceeds the user-specified threshold.
However, the results of frequent pattern extraction are
influenced by the aggregation. Consider the case of
transactions in Table III, and search frequent patterns when the
minimum support is set at 0.6. Without the aggregation, all
frequent patterns, which include subsets, are enumerated: {a},
{b}, {c}, {d}, {a, b}, {a, c}, {a, d}, {b, c}, {b, d}, {a, b, c},
and {a, b, d}. There are two closed patterns, {a, b, c} and {a, b,
d}, and others are the subset of the two.
Suppose that the aggregation threshold is set to 100%; it
means that only itemsets where all items are always
co-occurring are aggregated. In this example, items a and b
always appear in transactions and are therefore aggregated,
with ab denoting the aggregated set of items a and b. After this
aggregation, the number of frequent patterns enumerated is
reduced to 3: {ab}, {ab, c}, and {ab, d}. Most patterns that are
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TABLE III. SAMPLE TRANSACTION DATA
Transaction ID Item IDs
1 a, b, c
2 a, b, c
3 a, b, c, d
4 a, b, c, d
5 a, b, d
subsets of other patterns are not extracted, and all closed
patterns are extracted. When the threshold is set to 100%, it
does not affect the extraction of closed patterns. However,
when the aggregation threshold is set at 80%, items a, b, and c
are aggregated into one and only {abc} is enumerated. When
threshold is set other than 100%, the closed patterns that
partially overlapped with aggregated itemsets cannot be
enumerated, although it reduces input data size, accelerates
calculation, and improves feasibility of the frequent pattern
algorithm to the large dataset.
As discussed previously, a trade-off exists between the
correctness of pattern mining results and the feasibility of the
mining algorithm. It is advisable to set the aggregation
threshold higher as long as pattern mining algorithm works.
IV. APPLICATION
A. Summary of Traffic Sensor Data and Congested Link
Information
This study analyzes the observation data of traffic sensors
located in three Secondary Area Partitions of Standard Grid
Square in the southern part of main island of Okinawa: Naha:
#392725, Itoman: #392715, and Yonabaru: #392726.
The data consists of time-mean speeds and traffic volumes of
every five minutes on 510 links in 853 days from June 1, 2011
to September 30, 2013.
This study first composes traffic congestion information of
each link at each time, based on an estimated critical speed of
each link. The critical speed is estimated separately by
weekdays or holidays, and hours without rainfall or with
heavy rainfall, to analyze the differences of traffic congestion
patterns caused by the differences of types of vehicles and
drivers by days of the week, and by weather conditions. The
observations at Naha meteorological station are used for
weather condition setting. Rainfall that exceeds 5 mm/h is
defined as heavy rain condition. The traffic sensor data is
observed for 20 472 h, where 18 831 h do not have rainfall,
and 378 h have heavy rainfall.
Fig. 3 shows a sample of fundamental diagrams at the
Asahibashi intersection on the southbound of Route 58
without rainfall on weekdays. Traffic volume and time-mean
speed are recorded as integer values in the traffic sensor data.
The recorded pairs of volume and speed whose frequencies are
less than 0.01% of the total number of records of at least one
vehicle observation are excluded as outliers. Fig. 3 shows the
speeddensity and speedflow relations. Traffic density data is
rounded by every 0.5 vehicles per kilometers. Red points
indicate data that satisfies the frequency threshold, and points
with colder color indicates data with smaller frequencies than
the threshold. Space mean speed is required to estimate traffic
density and requires time-mean speed instead of space-mean
speed to be adopted in the analysis due to the data limitation.
Thus, average speed is overestimated and traffic density is
underestimated.
 Next, critical speed on each link is estimated from traffic
density and average speed data. Fig. 3(a) shows that speed
values that correspond to the same density value have large
variation. To estimate the maximum flow performance of road
links, this study first removes data points in extreme condition
that is far from the traffic condition near critical speed; that is,
traffic density smaller than 5 vehicles per kilometer or average
speed is lower than 20 km/h. Then, a data point at the highest
speed value is selected for each density values. Using the
selected data points, the linear relationship between speed and
density is estimated. The black line in Fig. 3(a) illustrates the
estimated speeddensity relationship. Under the assumption
that the relationship between density and speed is linear,
critical speed corresponds to half of the intercept in the
speeddensity relationship. A red bold line in Fig. 3(b)
illustrates the estimated critical speed; it seems to correspond
to the speed where traffic volume is maximum.
Based on the estimation of critical speed for every traffic
condition, the congestion of each link at each time is judged at
5-min basis. However, the results of congestion judgment of
each link are unstable in time. It is possible that the influence
of signal control on traffic flows affects the 5-min basis of
traffic observation. Thus, congestion data is aggregated in
15-min basis. If a link is judged to be congested from at least
one record of traffic sensor data in 15 min, the link is recorded
as congested at that period.
B. Verification of the Feasibility of the Proposed Method
This section verifies the feasibility of the proposed method
to extract traffic congestion patterns from the congestion link
information. The following experiments were conducted on
Intel(R) Xeon(R) 2.8 GHz PC with 8 GB main memory,
running on Windows 10. All programs were written by C++
and implemented by Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.
First, we checked the effectiveness of preprocessing, the
aggregation of frequent itemset. The target period is between 4
p.m. and 8 p.m. on Mondays without rainfall. The number of
congested links during the target period on Mondays is the
lowest among weekdays. Fig. 4 shows the summary of
analysis results with and without the aggregation of
co-occurring itemsets. It indicates the relationships of the
minimum support settings to the execution time of the
proposed method and to the number of enumerated patterns
when the threshold for aggregation is set at 100%. The
aggregation of co-occurring sets does not affect the closed
pattern discoveries; however, it shortens the execution time
drastically. When the minimum support is set at 90%, the
aggregation reduces the execution time in 1/100.
Even when the preprocessing process with the aggregation
threshold of 100% is applied, the small minimum support
setting generates the exponentially large number of
enumerated patterns. However, it is far better than the case
without aggregation and it is clear that the aggregation
enhanced the feasibility of the proposed method.
C. Confirmation of the Effectiveness in Analyzing Traffic
Congestion Patterns
We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in
enumerating traffic congestion patterns and analyzing their
characteristics that correspond to the different traffic
conditions, such as day of the week and weather.
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(a) Speeddensity (b) Speedflow
Figure 3. Fundamental diagrams at Asahibashi intersection on the
southbound of Route 58 without rain on weekdays. (Link ID is 6 in the
Standard Grid Square Code 392725.)
100,000,000 100,000
the number of enumerated patterns
10,000,000
10,000
1,000,000
100,000
execution time(sec)
1,000
10,000
100
1,000
100
10
10
1 1
100 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 84 83 82 81 80
minimum support(%)
enumerated patterns without aggregation
enumerated patterns with aggreation
execution time without aggregation
execution time with aggreation
Figure 4. Relationship of minimum support values to execution time and
the number of enumerated patterns.
This analysis set the aggregation threshold at 90% and the
minimum support at 60%. If the aggregation threshold is set
higher, it is difficult to execute the method on Friday data,
when the number of congested links is the maximum in
weekdays. Table IV shows the results of Fridays and
Mondays without rainfall, and weekdays with rainfall; each
data consist of 79, 69, and 70 day-observation, respectively.
The proposed method extracted huge number of patterns
that overlapped each other. This study selected the congestion
patterns that represented continuous traffic congestion
throughout the whole target period between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.
and whose total number of congested links was the largest.
Patterns overlapping larger patterns were discarded. Fig. 5
shows the three selected major congested patterns in the
central Naha, the largest city in Okinawa, and summarized in
Table V. The colors in Table V correspond to the colors of the
links in Fig. 5.
Fig. 5 illustrates the traffic congestion propagation
processes, where congestion expands from (a) to (d) and
shrinks afterwards.
Comparison of congestion patterns reveals that pattern #1
expands earlier than any other patterns. They are also
confirmed to be independent traffic congestion patterns.
When the patterns on different days of the week without
 TABLE IV. EXECUTION TIME AND NUMBER OF CLOSED PATTERNS The proposed method generates many congestion patterns.
Execution time Number of The application of this study extracted patterns that continue
(sec) closed patterns for the longest time and expands to wider area. Analysts can
Without Fridays 3390.4 9 450 also extract patterns that expand to the widest area although
rainfall Mondays 61.1 3 140 their duration are relatively short and raises the possibility
With rainfall Weekdays 3391.1 15 067 that a different conclusion will be reached. It also needs to
consider which congestion patterns should be selected to
TABLE V. SELECTED CONGESTION PATTERNS IN THE CENTRAL NAHA analyze traffic congestion propagation processes.
Rainfall Day of the week All links Max links Further consideration on the aggregation of co-occurring
Fridays 72 9 itemsets in the preprocessing is also necessary. Reducing the
False
Pattern 1 Mondays 45 9 aggregation threshold improves the feasibility of the
True Weekdays 67 10
Fridays 68 9
proposed method. However, the closed patterns that partially
Pattern 2
False
Mondays 30 2 overlapped with the aggregated itemsets cannot be
True Weekdays 75 9 enumerated. Thus, an effective mining method that generates
Fridays 52 6 patterns at low minimum support values without reducing the
False
Pattern 3 Mondays 34 4 threshold for aggregation is required to be developed.
True Weekdays 42 6
The proposed method needs further investigations to
rainfall are compared, the characteristics of congestion confirm its applicability to larger dataset and its effectiveness
patterns are illuminated. The patterns on Fridays expand in comparative analyses of characteristics of traffic
wider and continue for a longer time as compared to the congestion patterns in different cities.
patterns on Mondays. This confirms that severe traffic
condition occurs on Fridays. The patterns on Fridays without ACKNOWLEDGMENT
rainfall and weekdays with rainfall have some resemblance; The authors would like to thank the Okinawa Prefectural
the congestion affected the traffic in broader area. Police Department for providing the traffic sensor data. This
When it is raining, congestion seems to occur at an earlier work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers
time. The number of congested links reaches maximum at JP26630233 and JP15H04053.
around 6 p.m., although the heaviest congestion usually
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We propose the three points below for future discussion.

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On Fridays without rainfall On Mondays without rainfall On Weekdays with rainfall
(a) 4:00 p.m. 4:15 p.m.

On Fridays without rainfall On Mondays without rainfall On Weekdays with rainfall

(b) 5:00 p.m. 5:15 p.m.

On Fridays without rainfall On Mondays without rainfall On Weekdays with rainfall

(c) 6:00 p.m. 6:15 p.m.

On Fridays without rainfall On Mondays without rainfall On Weekdays with rainfall

(d) 7:00 p.m. 7:15 p.m.

On Fridays without rainfall On Mondays without rainfall On Weekdays with rainfall

(e) 7:45 p.m. 8:00 p.m.
Figure 5. Transition of selected congestion patterns in central Naha.

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