Inferring transportation mode from smartphone sensors: Evaluating the potential of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

Urban Mobility Pattern Detection: Development of a Classification Algorithm Based on Machine Learning and GPS

This study introduces an innovative algorithm for classifying transportation modes. It categorizes modes such as walking, biking, tram, bus, taxi, and private vehicles based on data collected through sensors embedded in smartphones. The data include date, time, latitude, longitude, altitude, and speed, gathered using a mobile application specifically designed for this project. These data were collected through the smartphone's GPS to enhance the accuracy of the analysis. The stopping times of each transport mode, as well as the distance traveled and average speed, are analyzed to identify patterns and distinctive features. Conducted in Cuenca, Ecuador, the study aims to develop and validate an algorithm to enhance urban planning. It extracts significant features from mobility patterns, including speed, acceleration, and over-acceleration, and applies longitudinal dynamics to train the classification model. The classification algorithm relies on a decision tree model, achieving a high accuracy of 94.6% in validation and 94.9% in testing, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Additionally, the precision metric of 0.8938 signifies the model's ability to make correct positive predictions, with nearly 90% of positive instances correctly identified. Furthermore, the recall metric at 0.83084 highlights the model's capability to identify real positive instances within the dataset, capturing over 80% of positive instances. The calculated F1-score of 0.86117 indicates a harmonious balance between precision and recall, showcasing the models robust and well-rounded performance in classifying transport modes effectively. The study discusses the potential applications of this method in urban planning, transport management, public transport route optimization, and urban traffic monitoring. This research represents a preliminary stage in generating an origin-destination (OD) matrix to better understand how people move within the city.

Investigating the potential of aggregated mobility indices for inferring public transport ridership changes

Aggregated mobility indices (AMIs) derived from information and communications technologies have recently emerged as a new data source for transport planners, with particular value during periods of major disturbances or when other sources of mobility data are scarce. Particularly, indices estimated on the aggregate user concentration in public transport (PT) hubs based on GPS of smartphones, or the number of PT navigation queries in smartphone applications have been used as proxies for the temporal changes in PT aggregate demand levels. Despite the popularity of these indices, it remains largely untested whether they can provide a reasonable characterisation of actual PT ridership changes. This study aims to address this research gap by investigating the reliability of using AMIs for inferring PT ridership changes by offering the first rigorous benchmarking between them and ridership data derived from smart card validations and tickets. For the comparison, we use monthly and daily ridership data from 12 cities worldwide and two AMIs shared globally by Google and Apple during periods of major change in 2020-22. We also explore the complementary role of AMIs on traditional ridership data. The comparative analysis revealed that the index based on human mobility (Google) exhibited a notable alignment with the trends reported by ridership data and performed better than the one based on PT queries (Apple). Our results differ from previous studies by showing that AMIs performed considerably better for similar periods. This finding highlights the huge relevance of dealing with methodological differences in datasets before comparing. Moreover, we demonstrated that AMIs can also complement data from smart card records when ticketing is missing or of doubtful quality. The outcomes of this study are particularly relevant for cities of developing countries, which usually have limited data to analyse their PT ridership, and AMIs may offer an attractive alternative.

Accuracy Improvement of Vehicle Recognition by Using Smart Device Sensors

This paper explores the utilization of smart device sensors for the purpose of vehicle recognition. Currently a ubiquitous aspect of people's lives, smart devices can conveniently record details about walking, biking, jogging, and stepping, including physiological data, via often built-in phone activity recognition processes. This paper examines research on intelligent transportation systems to uncover how smart device sensor data may be used for vehicle recognition research, and fit within its growing body of literature. Here, we use the accelerometer and gyroscope, which can be commonly found in a smart phone, to detect the class of a vehicle. We collected data from cars, buses, trains, and bikes using a smartphone, and we designed a 1D CNN model leveraging the residual connection for vehicle recognition. The model achieved more than 98% accuracy in prediction. Moreover, we also provide future research directions based on our study.

Review of Transit Data Sources: Potentials, Challenges and Complementarity

Public transport has become one of the major transport options, especially when it comes to reducing motorized individual transport and achieving sustainability while reducing emissions, noise and so on. The use of public transport data has evolved and rapidly improved over the past decades. Indeed, the availability of data from different sources, coupled with advances in analytical and predictive approaches, has contributed to increased attention being paid to the exploitation of available data to improve public transport service. In this paper, we review the current state of the art of public transport data sources. More precisely, we summarize and analyze the potential and challenges of the main data sources. In addition, we show the complementary aspects of these data sources and how to merge them to broaden their contributions and face their challenges. This is complemented by an information management framework to enhance the use of data sources. Specifically, we seek to bridge the gap between traditional data sources and recent ones, present a unified overview of them and show how they can all leverage recent advances in data-driven methods and how they can help achieve a balance between transit service and passenger behavior.