Decentralised Traffic Incident Detection via Network Lasso

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of Network Lasso, a distributed optimization framework, to enhance traffic incident detection with traditional machine learning models in decentralized data environments, offering a promising alternative to federated learning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of Network Lasso for traffic incident detection, demonstrating its effectiveness and convergence guarantees compared to federated and centralized methods.

Findings

Network Lasso achieves strong convergence in traffic detection tasks.

The approach outperforms local learning and matches federated learning in decentralized scenarios.

Traditional ML models remain valuable with the right distributed optimization techniques.

Abstract

Traffic incident detection plays a key role in intelligent transportation systems, which has gained great attention in transport engineering. In the past, traditional machine learning (ML) based detection methods achieved good performance under a centralised computing paradigm, where all data are transmitted to a central server for building ML models therein. Nowadays, deep neural networks based federated learning (FL) has become a mainstream detection approach to enable the model training in a decentralised manner while warranting local data governance. Such neural networks-centred techniques, however, have overshadowed the utility of well-established ML-based detection methods. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of potent conventional ML-based detection models in modern traffic scenarios featured by distributed data. We leverage an elegant but less explored distributed optimisation framework named Network Lasso, with guaranteed global convergence for convex problem formulations, integrate the potent convex ML model with it, and compare it with centralised learning, local learning, and federated learning methods atop a well-known traffic incident detection dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed network lasso-based approach provides a promising alternative to the FL-based approach in data-decentralised traffic scenarios, with a strong convergence guarantee while rekindling the significance of conventional ML-based detection methods.