TRB Pubsindex
Text Size:
x

« Prev Next »

Return to Results | New Search

Bookmark and Share

Title:

Is Social Media an Appropriate Data Source to Improve Travel Demand Estimation Models?

Accession Number:

01659727

Record Type:

Component

Abstract:

Social media data has emerged as an innovative data source for traffic analysis. In this paper, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of including Twitter data into the Origin-Destination (OD) trip estimation. 1.3 million of geo-tagged tweets in the Greater Sydney Area for more than two months are collected, and information such as Twitter OD trips, the number of friends and followers of Twitter users are extracted as the independent variables in the OD trip regression model. The Random Forest (RF) regression technique is applied to develop the OD trip regression. The performance of the models considering Twitter data and not including Twitter data are compared via 10-fold cross-validation method. The results indicate that the accuracy and stability of the RF regression model can be improved if the authors consider Twitter data in the independent variables. Inspired from this finding, the authors conclude that social media data can be an effective data source to improve the prediction of traditional travel demand models. The regression results at the suburb level also suggest that the heterogeneity of socio-demographic features across suburbs will affect the model performance. To further improve the prediction, it is necessary to categorize suburbs into groups based on socio-demographic characteristics such as population density and distance to city center, and develop a separate OD trip regression model for each group.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ30 Standing Committee on Urban Transportation Data and Information Systems.

Report/Paper Numbers:

18-06774

Language:

English

Authors:

Cheng, Zesheng
Jian, Sisi
Maghrebi, Mojtaba
Rashidi, Taha Hossein
Waller, Steven Travis

Pagination:

18p

Publication Date:

2018

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Identifier Terms:

Twitter

Geographic Terms:

Sydney (Australia)

Subject Areas:

Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting; Transportation (General)

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-06774

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Jan 8 2018 11:45AM