Modeling Commuter’s Sociodemographic Characteristics to Predict Public Transport Usage Frequency by Applying Supervised Machine Learning Method

Predictive modeling is the key fundamental method to study passengers’ behavior in transportation research. One of the limited studied topic is modeling of public transport usage frequency, which can be used to estimate present and future demand and users’ trend toward public transport services. The artificial intelligence and machine learning methods are promising to be better substitute to statistical techniques. No doubt, traditionally been used econometrics models are better for causal relationship studies among variables, but they made rigid assumptions and unable to recognize the pattern in data. This paper aims to build a predictive model to solve passengers’ classification, and public transport usage frequency using socio-demographic survey data. The supervised machine learning algorithm, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) applied to build a predictive model, which is the better machine learning method for dealing with small datasets, because of its ability of having less parameter tuning. Survey data has been used to train and validate the model performance, which is able to predict public transport usage frequency of future users of public transport. This model can practically be used by public transport agencies and relevant government organizations to predict the public transport demand for new commuters before introducing any new transportation projects.