Travel Time Reliability of an urban bus route, a comparison of Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) approaches

Reliability is a key factor in public transportation systems, significantly influencing passenger satisfaction and their perceptions of service quality. Therefore, measures of Travel Time Reliability (TTR), which help quantify unexpected delays, are essential for effectively planning and managing travel times. This research aims to provide a prediction model for standard deviation of travel time, as an indicator of TTR, on an urban bus route using Automatic Vehicle Location data as well as evaluating and comparing the results of ARIMA and LSTM models. Our research contributes to the existing body of literature by considering the effect of a wide range of predictor variables which were categorized by route characteristics, weather condition, congestion, and temporal feature, on bus TTR, which received less attention in previous studies. The results show that LSTM is an efficient and accurate TTR predictive model than ARIMA, with an accuracy of about 87%. In addition, the LSTM model exhibits lower mean absolute percentage error (40%), mean square error (52.08%), and root mean square error (39.70%) compared to the corresponding values in the ARIMA model. Also, the congestion, weather condition, and holidays are the key variables in increasing the accuracy of LSTM model, respectively. Our findings provide insights to facilitate the decision-making of managers and planners in public transportation planning sector to improve transit reliability and passengers’ satisfaction level.