  Traffic speed is central to characterizing the fluidity of the road network.
Many transportation applications rely on it, such as real-time navigation,
dynamic route planning, and congestion management. Rapid advances in sensing
and communication techniques make traffic speed detection easier than ever.
However, due to sparse deployment of static sensors or low penetration of
mobile sensors, speeds detected are incomplete and far from network-wide use.
In addition, sensors are prone to error or missing data due to various kinds of
reasons, speeds from these sensors can become highly noisy. These drawbacks
call for effective techniques to recover credible estimates from the incomplete
data. In this work, we first identify the issue as a spatiotemporal kriging
problem and propose a Laplacian enhanced low-rank tensor completion (LETC)
framework featuring both lowrankness and multi-dimensional correlations for
large-scale traffic speed kriging under limited observations. To be specific,
three types of speed correlation including temporal continuity, temporal
periodicity, and spatial proximity are carefully chosen and simultaneously
modeled by three different forms of graph Laplacian, named temporal graph
Fourier transform, generalized temporal consistency regularization, and
diffusion graph regularization. We then design an efficient solution algorithm
via several effective numeric techniques to scale up the proposed model to
network-wide kriging. By performing experiments on two public million-level
traffic speed datasets, we finally draw the conclusion and find our proposed
LETC achieves the state-of-the-art kriging performance even under low
observation rates, while at the same time saving more than half computing time
compared with baseline methods. Some insights into spatiotemporal traffic data
modeling and kriging at the network level are provided as well.
