Using Data Mining to Analyze Archived Traffic Related Data

Little is known to date about the value of applying data mining, especially association mining, to transportation-generated data. The rapid development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has generated large amounts of data for transportation professionals. Some of these data are being used in data mining investigations following on the success researchers on areas like business and computer sciences have had, yet there is still much to be learned. The methodology used in this study consisted of using association methods to obtain new information from pairs of data such as time and level of service. In this paper, how traditional views of traffic data can be complemented with data mining techniques is explored and described, thereby demonstrating the opportunities that data mining could offer in better understanding the situation and, furthermore, help yield better decisions. The results present graphical illustrations of the associations found between the different pairs of data and the corresponding discussions.