  The problem of modeling and predicting spatiotemporal traffic phenomena over
an urban road network is important to many traffic applications such as
detecting and forecasting congestion hotspots. This paper presents a
decentralized data fusion and active sensing (D2FAS) algorithm for mobile
sensors to actively explore the road network to gather and assimilate the most
informative data for predicting the traffic phenomenon. We analyze the time and
communication complexity of D2FAS and demonstrate that it can scale well with a
large number of observations and sensors. We provide a theoretical guarantee on
its predictive performance to be equivalent to that of a sophisticated
centralized sparse approximation for the Gaussian process (GP) model: The
computation of such a sparse approximate GP model can thus be parallelized and
distributed among the mobile sensors (in a Google-like MapReduce paradigm),
thereby achieving efficient and scalable prediction. We also theoretically
guarantee its active sensing performance that improves under various practical
environmental conditions. Empirical evaluation on real-world urban road network
data shows that our D2FAS algorithm is significantly more time-efficient and
scalable than state-of-the-art centralized algorithms while achieving
comparable predictive performance.
