Text-Based Delay Prediction in a Public Transport Monitoring System

Abstract

Computing technologies have already established their place in various areas of public transport control in smart cities. While the analysis of signals coming from various sensors is executed at a very high level of sophistication, information expressed by humans in natural language is still not being used in a way that takes advantage of its full potential. Existing research on text mining in public transport monitoring is focused mainly on event detection. In this paper, we present a novel approach to vehicle delay prediction based on text data. The proposed method fuses information coming from standard sources (sensors) with text messages, to construct a regression model, that predicts delays for previously unseen messages describing road conditions. The method has been implemented based on an existing public transport monitoring system in Warsaw, Poland. In the paper, we discuss it briefly. Delay prediction based on information expressed in natural language will not replace standard methods for delay prediction that involve the use of vehicle sensors. However, it offers an attractive alternative to mine for knowledge from sources such as social media.