Chaos theory is used to analyze highly complex systems and thus may be useful for
transportation applications. In this paper, a series of analyses find and exploit chaos are outlined,
including time delays and embedding dimensions, Fourier power series, the correlation
dimension, the largest Lyapunov exponent, and predictions. As an example, traffic flow data is
analyzed and found to be chaotic, though it is shown that this could be the result of highfrequency
noise. When used with a low-pass filter, predictions based on chaos theory are shown
to have greater predictive power than a nonlinear least-squares method.