Journal of Advances in Mathematics and Computer Science

With the development of society and economy, people's living standards are improving day by day. The number of private cars is increasing, and the problem of urban traffic congestion is becoming more and more serious. Short-term traffic flow prediction is crucial to assist intelligent transportation system decision-making, solve congestion problems, and improve road capacity. In order to effectively improve the prediction accuracy and improve the generalization performance of the model, this paper combines extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and harris hawk optimization (HHO) to propose a multi-step prediction hybrid model. When building a hybrid model, the hyperparameter selection of the XGBoost model is converted into an optimization problem, and the optimization problem is solved through HHO. The solution to the final optimization problem is the optimal parameter combination of the XGBoost model. In order to verify the performance and competitiveness of the model, this study applies the proposed model to traffic flow prediction together with seven other representative models. The results show that the model has high accuracy and stability in practical applications.