Validation of Seasonal ARIMA Models on Road Traffic Noise Measurements

The Time Series Analysis (TSA) technique is largely used in economics and related field, to understand the slope of a given univariate dataset and to predict its future behaviour. The Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) models are a class of TSA models that, based on the periodicity observed in the series, build a predictive function that can extend the forecast to a given number of future periods. In this paper, these techniques are applied to a dataset of equivalent sound levels, measured in an urban environment. The periodic pattern will evidence a strong influence of human activities (in particular road traffic) on the noise observed. All the three models will exploit the seasonality of the series and will be calibrated on a partial dataset of 800 data. Once the parameters of the models will be evaluated, all the forecasting functions will be tested and validated on a dataset not used before. The performances of all the models will be evaluated in terms of errors values and distributions, such as introducing some error indexes that explain the peculiar features of the models results.