Bus Travel Time Prediction Using Support Vector Machines for High Variance Conditions

Abstract

Real-time bus travel time prediction has been an interesting problem since past decade, especially in India. Popular methods for travel time prediction include time series analysis, regression methods, Kalman filter method and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) method. Reported studies using these methods did not consider the high variance situations arising from the varying traffic and weather conditions, which is very common under heterogeneous and lane-less traffic conditions such as the one in India. The aim of the present study is to analyse the variance in bus travel time and predict the travel time accurately under such conditions. Literature shows that Support Vector Machines (SVM) technique is capable of performing well under such conditions and hence is used in this study. In the present study, nu-Support Vector Regression (SVR) using linear kernel function was selected. Two models were developed, namely spatial SVM and temporal SVM, to predict bus travel time. It was observed that in high mean and variance sections, temporal models are performing better than spatial. An algorithm to dynamically choose between the spatial and temporal SVM models, based on the current travel time, was also developed. The unique features of the present study are the traffic system under consideration having high variability and the variables used as input for prediction being obtained from Global Positioning System (GPS) units alone. The adopted scheme was implemented using data collected from GPS fitted public transport buses in Chennai (India). The performance of the proposed method was compared with available methods that were reported under similar traffic conditions and the results showed a clear improvement.

Route Planning under Mobility Restrictions in the Palestinian Territories

“…Others have developed travel time prediction models, including parametric methods such as linear regression [43], Bayesian Nets [44], and Time Series models [45]. Additionally, there are non-parametric models like Artificial Neural Network models [46] and machine learning methods like K-Nearest Neighbours [47], Support Vector Regression [48], and Random Forest Regression [49].…”

Clustering Algorithm for a Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows

“…In which, a time window is a more popular constraint than the vehicle capacity. According to Bachu et al (2021), building a model to respond to time constraints is a major challenge. Thus, almost all previous studies consider one of two constraints when determining the optimal solution.…”

Hybrid travel time estimation model for public transit buses using limited datasets

“…Machine learning (ML) models such as artificial neural networks (ANN) to deep networks models [20], several authors have researched on the application of these models for short and long term travel time predictions. Considering high variances in the travel time authors in [21] have implemented the support vector regression (SVR) model in Chennai, India. Spatial and temporal SVR model is implemented to predict dynamic travel time using only GPS data of buses.…”