Title: Understanding user demographics using public transportation data

Authors: Sherief Abdallah; Wesam Alnusairat

Addresses: Faculty of Engineering and IT, The British University in Dubai, Dubai, UAE ' Faculty of Engineering and IT, The British University in Dubai, Dubai, UAE

Abstract: As smart cards become dominant in public transportation, more data is collected that capture passenger behaviours: their trip times, which stations do they hop in/out, etc. Understanding passenger demographics can have important applications for health and marketing, as well as public transportation. For example, if we know that a certain metro station has high concentration of young children (students), then the transport authority may increase the security in the station to ensure the children's safety. In this work, we collect real smart card data from a cosmopolitan city in the Middle East and analyse how it relates to the underlying passenger demographics. Our analysis illustrates how association rule-mining can expose rules that are indicative of age, gender and nationality based on usage patterns of public transportation.

Keywords: public transport; data science; association rule mining; passenger demographics; data mining.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBISE.2019.098868

International Journal of Business Intelligence and Systems Engineering, 2019 Vol.1 No.3, pp.251 - 260

Received: 15 Nov 2016
Accepted: 16 Nov 2017

Published online: 09 Apr 2019 *

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