Deep causal inference for understanding the impact of meteorological variations on traffic

Abstract

Understanding the causal impact of meteorological variations on traffic conditions (e.g., traffic flow and speed) is crucial for effective traffic prediction and management, as well as the mitigation of adverse weather effects on traffic. However, many existing studies focused on establishing associations between meteorological situations and traffic, rather than delving into causal relationships, especially with deep learning techniques. Consequently, the ability to identify specific meteorological conditions that significantly contribute to traffic congestion or delays is still limited. To address this issue, this study proposes the Meteorological-Traffic Causal Inference Variational Auto-Encoder Model (MT-CIVAE) to estimate the causal impact of fine-grained meteorological variations (e.g., rain and temperature) on traffic. Specifically, MT-CIVAE is based on the Variational Auto-Encoder and consists of an encoder to recover the distribution of latent confounders and a decoder to estimate the conditional probabilities of treatments. Transformer encoder layers are incorporated to analyze the spatial and temporal correlations of historical traffic data to further enhance the inference capability. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for causal inference, real-world traffic flow and speed datasets collected from California, along with corresponding fine-grained meteorological datasets, are employed. The counterfactual analysis is conducted using artificially generated meteorological conditions as treatments, which allows for the simulation of hypothetical meteorological scenarios and the evaluation of their potential impact on traffic conditions. This study develops deep learning methods for assessing the causal impact of meteorological variations on traffic dynamics, offering explanations and insights that can assist transportation institutions in guiding post-meteorology traffic management strategies.