Generational Differences in Automobility: Comparing America's Millennials and Gen Xers Using Gradient Boosting Decision Trees

Whether the Millennials are less auto-centric than the previous generations has been widely discussed in the literature. Most existing studies use regression models and assume that all factors are linear-additive in contributing to the young adults' driving behaviors. This study relaxes this assumption by applying a non-parametric statistical learning method, namely the gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT). Using U.S. nationwide travel surveys for 2001 and 2017, this study examines the non-linear dose-response effects of lifecycle, socio-demographic and residential factors on daily driving distances of Millennial and Gen-X young adults. Holding all other factors constant, Millennial young adults had shorter predicted daily driving distances than their Gen-X counterparts. Besides, residential and economic factors explain around 50% of young adults' daily driving distances, while the collective contributions for life course events and demographics are about 33%. This study also identifies the density ranges for formulating effective land use policies aiming at reducing automobile travel demand.

Exploring Human Mobility for Multi-Pattern Passenger Prediction: A Graph Learning Framework

Traffic flow prediction is an integral part of an intelligent transportation system and thus fundamental for various traffic-related applications. Buses are an indispensable way of moving for urban residents with fixed routes and schedules, which leads to latent travel regularity. However, human mobility patterns, specifically the complex relationships between bus passengers, are deeply hidden in this fixed mobility mode. Although many models exist to predict traffic flow, human mobility patterns have not been well explored in this regard. To reduce this research gap and learn human mobility knowledge from this fixed travel behaviors, we propose a multi-pattern passenger flow prediction framework, MPGCN, based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). Firstly, we construct a novel sharing-stop network to model relationships between passengers based on bus record data. Then, we employ GCN to extract features from the graph by learning useful topology information and introduce a deep clustering method to recognize mobility patterns hidden in bus passengers. Furthermore, to fully utilize Spatio-temporal information, we propose GCN2Flow to predict passenger flow based on various mobility patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to adopt a multipattern approach to predict the bus passenger flow from graph learning. We design a case study for optimizing routes. Extensive experiments upon a real-world bus dataset demonstrate that MPGCN has potential efficacy in passenger flow prediction and route optimization.