CONTINA: Confidence Interval for Traffic Demand Prediction with Coverage Guarantee

Accurate short-term traffic demand prediction is critical for the operation of traffic systems. Besides point estimation, the confidence interval of the prediction is also of great importance. Many models for traffic operations, such as shared bike rebalancing and taxi dispatching, take into account the uncertainty of future demand and require confidence intervals as the input. However, existing methods for confidence interval modeling rely on strict assumptions, such as unchanging traffic patterns and correct model specifications, to guarantee enough coverage. Therefore, the confidence intervals provided could be invalid, especially in a changing traffic environment. To fill this gap, we propose an efficient method, CONTINA (Conformal Traffic Intervals with Adaptation) to provide interval predictions that can adapt to external changes. By collecting the errors of interval during deployment, the method can adjust the interval in the next step by widening it if the errors are too large or shortening it otherwise. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that the coverage of the confidence intervals provided by our method converges to the target coverage level. Experiments across four real-world datasets and prediction models demonstrate that the proposed method can provide valid confidence intervals with shorter lengths. Our method can help traffic management personnel develop a more reasonable and robust operation plan in practice. And we release the code, model and dataset in \href{ https://github.com/xiannanhuang/CONTINA/}{ Github}.