With the rapid development of Internet of Things technologies, the next generation traffic monitoring infrastructures are connected via the web, to aid traffic data collection and intelligent traffic management. One of the most important tasks in traffic is anomaly detection, since abnormal drivers can reduce traffic efficiency and cause safety issues. This work focuses on detecting abnormal driving behaviors from trajectories produced by highway video surveillance systems. Most of the current abnormal driving behavior detection methods focus on a limited category of abnormal behaviors that deal with a single vehicle without considering vehicular interactions. In this work, we consider the problem of detecting a variety of socially abnormal driving behaviors, i.e., behaviors that do not conform to the behavior of other nearby drivers. This task is complicated by the variety of vehicular interactions and the spatial-temporal varying nature of highway traffic. To solve this problem, we propose an autoencoder with a Recurrent Graph Attention Network that can capture the highway driving behaviors contextualized on the surrounding cars, and detect anomalies that deviate from learned patterns. Our model is scalable to large freeways with thousands of cars. Experiments on data generated from traffic simulation software show that our model is the only one that can spot the exact vehicle conducting socially abnormal behaviors, among the state-of-the-art anomaly detection models. We further show the performance on real world HighD traffic dataset, where our model detects vehicles that violate the local driving norms.

Accurate and timely detection of large events on urban transportation networks enables informed mobility management. This work tackles the problem of extreme event detection on large-scale transportation networks using origin-destination mobility data, which is now widely available. Such data is highly structured in time and space, but high dimensional and sparse. Current multivariate time series anomaly detection methods cannot fully address these challenges. To exploit the structure of mobility data, we formulate the event detection problem in a novel way, as detecting anomalies in a set of time-dependent directed weighted graphs. We further propose a Context augmented Graph Autoencoder (Con-GAE) model to solve the problem, which leverages graph embedding and context embedding techniques to capture the spatial and temporal patterns. Con-GAE adopts an autoencoder framework and detects anomalies via semi-supervised learning. The performance of the method is assessed on several city-scale travel-time datasets from Uber Movement, New York taxis, and Chicago taxis and compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed Con-GAE can achieve an improvement in the area under the curve score as large as 0.15 over the second best method. We also discuss real-world traffic anomalies detected by Con-GAE.

Measuring the built and natural environment at a fine-grained scale is now possible with low-cost urban environmental sensor networks. However, fine-grained city-scale data analysis is complicated by tedious data cleaning including removing outliers and imputing missing data. While many methods exist to automatically correct anomalies and impute missing entries, challenges still exist on data with large spatial-temporal scales and shifting patterns. To address these challenges, we propose an online robust tensor recovery (OLRTR) method to preprocess streaming high-dimensional urban environmental datasets. A small-sized dictionary that captures the underlying patterns of the data is computed and constantly updated with new data. OLRTR enables online recovery for large-scale sensor networks that provide continuous data streams, with a lower computational memory usage compared to offline batch counterparts. In addition, we formulate the objective function so that OLRTR can detect structured outliers, such as faulty readings over a long period of time. We validate OLRTR on a synthetically degraded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature dataset, and apply it to the Array of Things city-scale sensor network in Chicago, IL, showing superior results compared with several established online and batch-based low-rank decomposition methods.

Event detection is gaining increasing attention in smart cities research. Large-scale mobility data serves as an important tool to uncover the dynamics of urban transportation systems, and more often than not the dataset is incomplete. In this article, we develop a method to detect extreme events in large traffic datasets, and to impute missing data during regular conditions. Specifically, we propose a robust tensor recovery problem to recover low-rank tensors under fiber-sparse corruptions with partial observations, and use it to identify events, and impute missing data under typical conditions. Our approach is scalable to large urban areas, taking full advantage of the spatio-temporal correlations in traffic patterns. We develop an efficient algorithm to solve the tensor recovery problem based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework. Compared with existing l 1 norm regularized tensor decomposition methods, our algorithm can exactly recover the values of uncorrupted fibers of a low-rank tensor and find the positions of corrupted fibers under mild conditions. Numerical experiments illustrate that our algorithm can achieve exact recovery and outlier detection even with missing data rates as high as 40% under 5% gross corruption, depending on the tensor size and the Tucker rank of the low rank tensor. Finally, we apply our method on a real traffic dataset corresponding to downtown Nashville, TN and successfully detect the events like severe car crashes, construction lane closures, and other large events that cause significant traffic disruptions.