Real Time Change Detection and Alerts from Highway Traffic Data

We developed a testbed containing: real time data from over 830 highway traffic sensors in the Chicago region, data about weather, and text data about events that might affect traffic. The goal was to detect in real time interesting changes in traffic conditions. Given the size and complexity of the data, we choose to build a large number of separate baseline models. We built a separate baseline for each hour in the day, for each day in the week, and for every 2 or 3 traffic sensors, resulting in over 42,000 separate baseline models. We also built a baseline engine to build the necessary baselines automatically. We modified an open source scoring engine to process in real time each new sensor reading, update the appropriate feature vectors, score the updated feature vectors using the baseline models, and send out real time alerts when deviations from the baselines were detected.