Fine-grained OD estimation with automated zoning and sparsity regularisation

•We present an algorithm for automatically identifying traffic analysis zones.•We show how enforcing sparsity can be used to mitigate the ill-posedness of OD estimation.•We show how to use held-out predictions to assess quality of OD estimates.

Given a road network, a fundamental object of interest is the matrix of origin destination (OD) flows. Estimation of this matrix involves at least three sub-problems: (i) determining a suitable set of traffic analysis zones, (ii) the formulation of an optimisation problem to determine the OD matrix, and (iii) a means of evaluating a candidate estimate of the OD matrix. This paper describes a means of addressing each of these concerns. We propose to automatically uncover a suitable set of traffic analysis zones based on observed link flows. We then employ regularisation to encourage the estimation of a sparse OD matrix. We finally propose to evaluate a candidate OD matrix based on its predictive power on held out link flows. Analysis of our approach on a real-world transport network reveals that it discovers automated zones that accurately capture regions of interest in the network, and a corresponding OD matrix that accurately predicts observed link flows.