Dominance of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Algorithms in Real-Time Traffic Flow prediction and Route Optimization in Autonomous Vehicles

The evolution of autonomous vehicles has elicited significant interest in understanding how real-time data may be used to provide enhanced driving experiences. This research project explored AI and Machine Learning methodologies applied for traffic forecasting and route optimization, and their implications for autonomous vehicles and urban mobility. For this project, the road traffic flow Dataset was utilized from Kaggle, containing 48,000 records of the flow of traffic, each including the following key features. In our work, we deployed some credible and well-established machine learning models: linear regression and random forest. These algorithms were separately trained by using a part of preprocessed data. The MSE for the Random Forest model was significantly lower, which means that the Random Forest Regressor had much smaller errors in estimating the volume of traffic compared to the Linear Regression model. The Random Forest Model had a high R² score, proving that this model explains a great deal of variance in the volume of traffic. This means that the 'model of random forest regressors' excellently fitted the data, snatching most of the important patterns and relationships between input features and target variables.