Mobility as A Language: Predicting Individual Mobility In Public Transportation Using N-Gram Models

TitleMobility as A Language: Predicting Individual Mobility In Public Transportation Using N-Gram Models
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsZhan Zhao, Haris Koutsopoulos, Jinhua Zhao
Conference NameTransportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
Abstract

For public transportation agencies, the ability to provide personalized and dynamic passenger information is crucial for improving the efficiency of demand management and enhancing customer experience. This requires understanding and especially predicting individual travel behavior in the public transportation system, which is challenging because of the heterogeneity among passengers and the variability of their behaviors. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to predict individual spatiotemporal behavior of public transportation passengers using smartcard data. In this study, each trip is coded as a combination of trip start time, an entry station and an exit station. A passenger’s daily mobility is represented as a chain of travel decisions. We propose a new modeling framework, inspired by Bayesian n-gram models used in natural language processing, to estimate the probability distribution of the next decision in the sequence. Empirical analysis using Oyster card data from London shows promising results. It is found that the exact time of travel is most challenging to predict, but the difference between the predicted time and the true value is usually small. Model performance varies greatly across individuals for the prediction of entry and particularly exit stations. Overall, our proposed model shows significant improvement over the regular n-gram models, or Markov chain-based models in general. The improvement is even larger for weekend trips when travel behavior is flexible, irregular, and considerably less predictable.