Bus Arrival Time Prediction: a Case Study for Almaty

The accurate bus arrival time information is crucial to passengers for reducing waiting times at the bus stop and improve the attractiveness of public transport. GPS-equipped buses can be considered as mobile sensors showing traffic flows on road surfaces. In this paper, we present an approach that predicts bus arrival time using historical bus GPS information and the real-time situation on the road. In this study, we divide bus arrival time into bus dwelling time at bus stops and bus travel time between stations and predict each of them separately. The clustering approach is used to predict the travel time between stations, and then for each cluster, we apply LSTM NN to predict walking time between stations. The latency at each bus stop we evaluate by historical dwelling time and using location analysis to find the importance of the bus stop as a point of interest during prediction time. The study is trained and tested on GPS data collected from 1200 buses in a period of 3 months.