2016 8th International Conference on Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Real-time Traffic Classification with Twitter Data

Mining

Dwi Aji Kurniawan1, Sunu Wibirama2, Noor Akhmad Setiawan3

Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology
Universitas Gadjah Mada
Indonesia
1
dwi.aji.k@mail.ugm.ac.id, 2sunu@ugm.ac.id, 3noorwewe@ugm.ac.id

Abstract The growth of vehicles in Yogyakarta Province,
Indonesia is not proportional to the growth of roads. This problem
causes severe traffic jam in many main roads. Common traffic
anomalies detection using surveillance camera requires manpower
and costly, while traffic anomalies detection with crowdsourcing
mobile applications are mostly owned by private. This research
aims to develop a real-time traffic classification by harnessing the
power of social network data, Twitter. In this study, Twitter data
are processed to the stages of preprocessing, feature extraction,
and tweet classification. This study compares classification
performance of three machine learning algorithms, namely Naive
Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Decision Tree
(DT). Experimental results show that SVM algorithm produced
the best performance among the other algorithms with 99.77%
and 99.87% of classification accuracy in balanced and imbalanced
data, respectively. This research implies that social network
service may be used as an alternative source for traffic anomalies
detection by providing information of traffic flow condition in
real-time.
Keywords traffic, data mining in Twitter, social network, tweet
classification, machine learning.
I. INTRODUCTION
The growth of vehicles in big cities is not proportional to the
growth of roads. Sooner or later, roads in big cities will be
increasingly jammed. Installation of surveillance cameras in
some streets and intersections has been common approach of
real-time traffic anomalies detection. Nevertheless, this
approach requires manpower to observe the cameras and to
locate spatial position of the traffic information. On the other
side, location-based crowdsourcing technology such as Waze
(https://www.waze.com) is currently used as drivers companion
for route finding. However, Waze is a proprietary service, thus
the authorities may find it difficult to get access to the data.
Social network service has been used to detect traffic
anomalies and events. An approach developed by Sakaki et al.
[1] shows that Twitter detect an event faster than traditional
media. D'Andrea et al. [2] compared the performance of seven
classification algorithms to classify Italian tweets. Sakaki et al.
[3] proposed four stages to detect locations in Japanese tweets.
Gu et al. [4] classify tweets about traffic in the city of Pittsburgh
and Philadelphia (USA) using the Semi Naive Bayes (SNB) and
Supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (sLDA). Gutirrez et al.
[5] classify English tweets using Support Vector Machine
(SVM) classifier in RapidMiner software. These studies used
local language as their source of information. Moreover, these
studies focused more on traffic events such as accidents, road
work, snow, road closures, but did not focus on the state of
traffic flow, such as traffic jams, crowded, crowded, crowded
smooth, and smooth.
There were also some studies in Indonesia related to the use
of social networking as traffic conditions monitoring. Research
by Wibisono et al. [6] in Jakarta used the concept of Learning
Vector Quantization (LVQ) neural network to classify tweets
into three classes: low traffic flow, medium traffic flow, and
high traffic flow. The system developed by Wibisono et al. [6]
used tweet from the official account of traffic officers as a data
source. Another study in Bandung by Rodiyansyah and Winarko
[7] classified four classes (Loss, Current, Unknown, and Model)
on traffic tweets using Naive Bayes and Support Vector
Machine (SVM) algorithm using RapidMiner software.
However, those previous work [6, 7] did not classify Twitter
data from all user (regular and official) in real-time.
In this research, we propose a novel real-time traffic
classification by classifying Twitter data into traffic or
non_traffic category. Classification was validated using ten
folds cross validation to measure accuracy, precision, recall, and
F-score of the classifiers and dataset.
II. DATA ACQUISITION
Tweets dataset about Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia were
used in this research to build classification model. We
categorized tweets into traffic and non_traffic. The data were
collected consecutively in seven days.
In the first stage, traffic tweets were collected from seven
official traffic monitoring Twitter accounts, namely
@ATCS_DIY, @atcs_kotasmrg, @atcs_kotatgr,
@atcs_pekalongan, @ntmclantaspolri, @tmcpoldametro, and
@tmcpolressemara. The data were collected using Twitter
REST API. Tweets from those accounts were cleaned from
non_traffic tweets, thus only tweets related with traffic condition
were considered. In the second stage, tweets were collected
using Twitter Streaming API from selected user in Table I and

978-1-5090-4139-8/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE

 2016 8th International Conference on Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Table II. We label the tweets with traffic and non_traffic

manually.
TABLE II
KEYWORDS USED IN TRACK PARAMETER
III. PROPOSED METHOD
The flowchart of the proposed method is shown in Fig. 1. Yogyakarta Jogjakarta Jogja
Yogya Adisutjipto Adi Sutjipto
lalinjogja RTMC_Jogja ATCS_DIY
jogjaupdate jogja24jam infojogja
yogyakartacity jogjamedia tribunjogja
unisifmyk UGM UII
UNY UMY lalinyk
B. Preprocessing
Preprocessing stage was applied to tweets to clean some
parts of tweets that were not needed in the next stages [8]. The
preprocessing steps in this study were as follows:
a) Removing the "RT". At this step, we used regular
expression "RT \ s" to find the appearances of "RT".
b) Converting all letters in a tweet to lowercase.
c) Removing website address in the tweet. At this step, we
use regular expression "\shttp.+\s".
d) Removing Twitter username. At this step, we used
regular expression "@[a-zA-Z0-9_]+".
e) Removing characters non-alphanumeric (alphabets and
numbers) characters. At this stage, we used the regular
expression "[^a-zA-Z0-9]".
f) Changing abbreviations to their actual phrases. We
changed abbreviations that frequently appeared in tweets.
C. Feature Extraction
This research used two types of feature extraction. The first
one was by using all words in the dataset as features. The second
one was by using only few selected words as features. Features
Fig. 1. Flowchart of the proposed method. were selected by their appearance in the dataset. We selected
words that appear most frequently in the traffic tweets dataset
A. Tweet Collection from Twitter Streaming API [9]. The steps were explained as follows:
New tweets were collected from Twitter Streaming API in a) Processing traffic tweets dataset with preprocessing
real time. There were some parameters that we used in Twitter steps.
Streaming API, such as follow and track parameters. Follow
b) Analyzing words appearance from the dataset.
parameter was used to get new tweets in real time from several
accounts, as shown in Table I. Track parameter was used to get c) Sorting by words that appeared most frequently.
new tweets in real time based on keywords defined in Table II. d) Taking 50 words that appeared most frequently.
TABLE I
e) Removing unneeded words, such as person name, place
TWITTER USERNAMES AND IDS USED IN FOLLOW PARAMETER name, etc.
Twitter Username Twitter User ID f) Removing words that had two letters or less.
@lalinjogja 250022672 A dictionary contained the words and their appearance count
@RTMC_Jogja 187397386 in a tweet was used as classifier.
@ATCS_DIY 1118238337
@twit_macet 4675666764 D. Classifier Model Building with Machine Learning
@JogjaUpdate 128175561 Algorithms
@Jogja24Jam 537556372 Tweets were classified into two categories, namely tweets
@infojogja 106780531 that were related to traffic (traffic) and tweets that were not
@YogyakartaCity 62327666 related to traffic (non_traffic). This classification was intended
@JogjaMedia 454564576 to separated tweets about traffic from another tweets. Three
@tribunjogja 223476605 machine learning algorithms, there are Nave Bayes (NB),
@unisifmyk 201720189
 2016 8th International Conference on Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Decision Tree (DT) were TABLE IV
used in this research. PREPROCESSING RESULT

Four parameters were used to evaluate performance [9] of Original Tweet After Preprocessing
each machine learning algorithm: UN 2016 : Tryout di SMA un 2016 tryout di sma
Muhammadiyah 3 Jogja Diikuti Ribuan muhammadiyah 3
1) Accuracy: Accuracy is the fraction of the classifications Peserta https://t.co/4bMhW4xoow jogja diikuti ribuan
result that are correct. The formula is https://t.co/zwpfMm8A57 peserta
09.55 wib lalin seputaran sp 09 55 wib lalu lintas
condongcatur ramai lancar seputaran simpang
2) Precision: Precision is the fraction of the predicted https://t.co/HRwTeIzlyt condongcatur ramai
documents in a class that are correct. The formula is lancar
D. Feature Extraction
3) Recall: Recall is the fraction of documents in a class that Feature extraction process counted the occurrences all the
correctly predicted by the system. The formula is words in a tweet as features. The dictionary that contained the
words and their occurrences was used to train classifier. A
dictionary was a set of data in key-value form. The key and the
4) F-score: F-score is a weighted harmonic mean of value were the words and their occurrences, respectively.
precision and recall. We use balanced F-score with formula Feature extraction by using only few selected words was then
 preceded with feature selection process. In feature selection
process, we got 40 words as features as shown in Table V.
We only measured precision, recall, and F-score in traffic
class. We calculated all parameters of evaluation through ten TABLE V
LIST OF FEATURES
folds cross validation technique.
Bahasa Bahasa
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS English English
Indonesia Indonesia
antrian queue maupun although
A. Tweets Data Acquisition arah direction mengarah directing
In tweet data acquisition stage, we collected 110,449 tweets arus flow menuju heading
data in total. This data were used in building classification atau or pada on
model. The 110,449 tweets data consisted of 17,592 tweets in barat west padat congested
traffic class and 92,857 tweets in non_traffic class. cerah sunny patuhi obey
cuaca weather pukul o'clock
B. Tweet Collection from Twitter Streaming API dalam in ramai crowded
dan and rambu sign
TABLE III
TWEETS FROM TWITTER STREAMING API dari from sebaliknya opposite
informasikan inform selatan south
Date and Time Tweet Text jalan road/street semua all
2016-03-15 UN 2016 : Tryout di SMA Muhammadiyah 3 kaki foot seputaran around
11:31:36 Jogja Diikuti Ribuan Peserta kami we simpang intersection
https://t.co/4bMhW4xoow kendaraan vehicle situasi situation
https://t.co/zwpfMm8A57 kondisi condition terpantau observed
2016-04-30 09.55 wib lalin seputaran sp condongcatur kota city tetap still
09:55:44 ramai lancar https://t.co/HRwTeIzlyt lalu part of phrase timur east
traffic in
Bahasa
Twitter Streaming API was a real time data source for our lancar smooth utara north
system. With Twitter Streaming API, Twitter sent tweet objects lintas part of phrase wib Western
in form of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) once there was a traffic in Indonesian
tweet match with our follow and track parameters. There were Bahasa Time
many variables in a tweet JSON object, but we only used
created_at and text variable. Table III shows example of tweets E. Development of Classifier Model using Machine Learning
received by our system. Algorithms
The amount of data used in this research were 110,449
C. Preprocessing tweets consisted of 17,592 traffic tweets and 92,857 non_traffic
Preprocessing stage was used to prepare tweet text before tweets. The dataset was imbalanced between classes. Thus the
processed in the next stages. There were some preprocessing evaluation measurement of classification model was conducted
steps as explained in the previous section. The example of for both imbalanced dataset and balanced dataset. Evaluation
preprocessing result is shown in Table IV. measurement for imbalanced dataset used all 110,449 tweets.
Evaluation measurement for balanced dataset used 35,184
tweets consisted of 17,592 traffic tweets and 17,592 non_traffic
 2016 8th International Conference on Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE), Yogyakarta, Indonesia

tweets. The 17,592 non_traffic tweets were selected randomly VIII, NB has the fastest training time because its simple model
from 92,857 non_traffic tweets. building. Moreover, DT training time was greatly influenced by
TABLE VI
the number of data and the number of features.
EVALUATION MEASUREMENT OF BALANCED DATASET (35,184 TWEETS) After evaluating three machine learning algorithms,
imbalanced dataset with 110,449 tweets and feature extraction
Feature Model Accuracy Precision Recall F-score using all words as features was used in the application. This
NB 99.37% 99.10% 99.62% 99.36% dataset was selected because it produced accuracy than balanced
All
SVM 99.77% 99.65% 99.89% 99.77% dataset with 35,184 tweets. Moreover, the real data fetched from
words
DT 99.48% 99.44% 99.52% 99.48%
Twitter Streaming API is highly imbalanced between traffic and
NB 98.02% 96.32% 99.71% 97.99%
Selected non_traffic category. Extraction of all words as features was
SVM 98.31% 97.23% 99.37% 98.29%
words used because it produced better accuracy than using only
DT 98.41% 97.52% 99.28% 98.39%
selected words as features.
Table VI shows that for balanced dataset with 35,184 tweets
and all words as features, SVM yielded the best performance in
all measurements (99.77%) as shown with yellow color. V. CONCLUSION
However, by using only selected words as features, DT yielded This research aims to develop a traffic tweet classification of
the best accuracy, precision, and F-score as shown with yellow Yogyakarta Province (Indonesia) in real time. We evaluated
color. three machine learning algorithms to find the best algorithms to
TABLE VII classify tweets data in real-time. As for imbalanced and balanced
EVALUATION MEASUREMENT OF IMBALANCED DATASET (110,449 TWEETS) dataset, Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm produced the
best performance using all words as features, while Decision
Feature Model Accuracy Precision Recall F-score Tree (DT) algorithm yielded best performance using only
NB 99.76% 98.94% 99.52% 99.23% selected words as feature. Experimental results show that SVM
All
SVM 99.87% 99.41% 99.80% 99.60% algorithm produced the best performance among the other
words
DT 99.70% 98.76% 99.34% 99.05% algorithms with 99.77% and 99.87% of classification accuracy
NB 99.23% 95.74% 99.39% 97.53% in balanced and imbalanced data, respectively. We also found
Selected
SVM 99.23% 96.43% 98.68% 97.54% that feature selection algorithm used in this research did not
words
DT 99.42% 96.75% 99.57% 98.14% improve accuracy. Furthermore, feature selection and the
amount of data affected the performance of classification model.
Further research is needed to investigate appropriate approach
As for imbalanced dataset with 110,449 tweets and all words for better classification regardless the amount of mined Twitter
as features, SVM yielded the best performance in all data.
measurement as shown in Table VII while DT produced best
accuracy with only selected words as features. From Table VI
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