Catch me if you can: Predicting mobility patterns of public transport users

Abstract

© 2014 IEEE. Direct and easy access to public transport information is an important factor for improving the satisfaction and experience of transport users. In the future, public transport information systems could be turned into personalized recommender systems which can help riders save time, make more effective decisions and avoid frustrating situations. In this paper, we present a predictive study of the mobility patterns of public transport users to lay the foundation for transport information systems with proactive capabilities. By making use of travel card data from a large population of bus riders, we describe algorithms that can anticipate bus stops accessed by individual riders to generate knowledge about future transport access patterns. To this end, we investigate and compare different prediction algorithms that can incorporate various influential factors on mobility in public transport networks, e.g., travel distance or travel hot spots. In our evaluation, we demonstrate that by combining personal and population-wide mobility patterns we can improve prediction accuracy, even with little knowledge of past behavior of transport users.