Addressing APC Data Sparsity in Predicting Occupancy and Delay of Transit Buses: A Multitask Learning Approach

Public transit is a vital mode of transportation in urban areas, and its efficiency is crucial for the daily commute of millions of people. To improve the reliability and predictability of transit systems, researchers have developed separate single-task learning models to predict the occupancy and delay of buses at the stop or route level. However, these models provide a narrow view of delay and occupancy at each stop and do not account for the correlation between the two. We propose a novel approach that leverages broader generalizable patterns governing delay and occupancy for improved prediction. We introduce a multitask learning toolchain that takes into account General Transit Feed Specification feeds, Automatic Passenger Counter data, and contextual temporal and spatial information. The toolchain predicts transit delay and occupancy at the stop level, improving the accuracy of the predictions of these two features of a trip given sparse and noisy data. We also show that our toolchain can adapt to fewer samples of new transit data once it has been trained on previous routes/trips as compared to state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we use actual data from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to validate our approach. We compare our approach against the state-of-the-art methods and we show that treating occupancy and delay as related problems improves the accuracy of the predictions. We show that our approach improves delay prediction significantly by as much as 4% in F1 scores while producing equivalent or better results for occupancy.