Analyzing Behavioral Patterns of Bus Passengers Using Data Mining Methods (Case Study: Rapid Transportation Systems)

The aim of analyzing passengers' behavioral patterns is providing support for transportation management. In other words, to improve services like scheduling, evacuation policies, and marketing, it is essential to understand spatial and temporal patterns of passengers' trips. Smart Card Automated Fare Collection System (SCAFCS) makes it possible to utilize data mining tools for the purpose of passengers' behavioral pattern analysis. The specific goal of this research is to obtain functional information for passenger's behavioral pattern analysis in city express bus which is called BRT, and classification of passengers to improve performance of bus fast transportation system. Additionally, it is attempted to predict usage and traffic status in a line through predicting passenger's behavior in a bus line. In this paper, smart card data is applied to provide combinational algorithms for clustering and analysis based on data mining. To this end, we have used a combination of data mining methods and particle swarm optimisation algorithm and leveraged multivariate time series prediction to estimate behavioral patterns. Results show that price and compression ratio features are the most influencing features in the separability of transportation smart card data. According to obtained Pareto front, four features include a card identification number, bus identification number, bus line number, and charge times are influencing clustering criteria.