Thesis Defense: Ibai Laña

Ibai Laña defended his PhD thesis work at the University of the Basque Country on October, 19th 2018, being awarded Cum Laude mention (International Doctorate), and obtaining their degree in “Doctoral Programme in Mobile Network Information and Communication Technologies”.

Ibai’ thesis, which title was “Design and Validation of Novel Methods for Long-term Road Traffic Forecasting”,revolves around data-driven traffic forecasting, ultimately pursuing long-term forecasts. This broadly entails a deep analysis and understanding of the state of the art, and dealing with incompleteness of data, among other issues. Long-term forecasting strategies reported to date are more scarce, and commonly based on the detection and assign- ment to patterns. These approaches can perform reasonably well unless an unexpected event yields unpredictable changes, or if the allocation to a pattern is inaccurate for any reason.Besides, the second part of this dissertation presents an application outlook of the developed techniques, providing methods and unexpected insights of the local impact of traffic in pollution. The obtained results reveal that the impact of vehicular emissions on the pollution levels is overshadowed
by the effects of stable meteorological conditions of this city.

Supervisors: Javier Del Ser and Manuel Vélez

Evaluation Commitee: Eleni Vlahogianni(National Technical University of Athens), Javier Sánchez Medina (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), Iñaki Inza (University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU)