| Summary: | Rapidly increasing vehicle congestion has been deteriorating the quality of life of
people in urban areas of many developed and developing countries, including India.
Caused mainly by rapid changes in urbanization, economy levels, vehicle ownership,
and population growth, congestion leads to problems such as increased travel time, air
pollution, and fuel use as well as decreased accessibility and mobility. In this regard,
effective measures must be taken to avoid traffic jams, which will in turn lead to the
sustainable development of the city. Travel time prediction plays an important role in
reducing congestion. It is an important issue in the area of Intelligent Transport System
(ITS) and Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS). The transportation system
becomes more efficient if there exists a system which accurately predicts travel time.
The passengers can plan their trips and choose the best route, depending on the traffic
conditions. Machine learning methods are gaining a lot of importance in travel time
prediction. Since the traffic data is large, random forest algorithm can successfully
handle this to provide accurate results. Random forest is a supervised and an ensemble
learning method which can be used for both classification and regression. Multiple
decision trees are built and merged together to get more stable and accurate prediction.
The data collected by RTA, New South Wales, Australia for the Westbound line has
been utilized. The performance of the random forest model is very high and the
predicted travel time has high level of accuracy in terms of Mean Absolute Percentage
Error (MAPE) compared to other traditional methods such as Support Vector Machine
(SVM), historical average, and simple linear regression.
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