A Structured Framework for Calibrating Stochastic Car-Following Models: Data Adequacy, Parameter Sensitivity, and Objective Selection

Abstract

Calibrating a stochastic car-following model is harder than its deterministic counterpart: the loss itself becomes a random variable, so a favorable random realization can be mistaken for a good parameter vector. This paper develops a structured framework for calibrating stochastic car-following models -- a completeness-controlled synthetic design, a corrected variance-based sensitivity analysis (VBSA), and the minimum-realization (MRMIN) calibration protocol -- across two structurally different stochastic mechanisms, QIDM and IDM2D. We test two claims from deterministic calibration -- that a small number of parameters, and the trajectory itself above all, dominates the sensitivity ranking, and that spacing calibration keeps dominating speed calibration once dynamics are stochastic -- and ask whether a model's noise term can be calibrated on its own. In a balanced synthetic experiment, driving-regime completeness has a mean total-effect index on par with the model's most influential parameter and roughly two orders of magnitude above pair identity, extending rather than reversing the deterministic finding on trajectory-identity dominance. Under MRMIN, calibrating only the noise parameter against a population-wide deterministic fit more than doubles median spacing error across 1644 NGSIM trajectories, but fitting the deterministic parameters per trajectory first and calibrating noise on top recovers it. Spacing calibration remains more cross-dimensionally robust than speed calibration on average, but the deterministic guarantee that this dominance can never reverse is violated in 19-26% of trajectories for both mechanisms. A multi-objective screen in relative-error space then favors joint spacing-speed goodness-of-fit functions over single-dimension spacing calibration. Deterministic calibration guarantees should therefore be re-tested, not assumed, once a model is stochastic.