Individual Mobility Prediction in Mass Transit Systems Using Smart Card Data: An Interpretable Activity-Based Hidden Markov Approach

Individual mobility is driven by demand for activities with diverse spatiotemporal patterns, but existing methods for mobility prediction often overlook the underlying activity patterns. Knowledge of activity patterns can improve the performance and interpretability of existing individual mobility models, leading to more informed policy design and better user experience in intelligent transportation systems. This study develops an activity-based modeling framework for individual mobility prediction in mass transit systems. Specifically, an input-output hidden Markov model (IOHMM) approach is proposed to simultaneously predict the (continuous) time and (discrete) location of an individual’s next trip using transit smart card data. The prediction task can be transformed into predicting the hidden activity duration and end location. Based on a case study of Hong Kong’s metro system, we show that the proposed model can achieve similar prediction performance as the state-of-the-art long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Unlike LSTM, the proposed IOHMM approach can also be used to analyze hidden activity patterns, which provides meaningful behavioral interpretation for why an individual makes a certain trip. Therefore, the activity-based prediction framework offers a way to preserve the predictive power of advanced machine learning methods while enhancing our ability to generate insightful behavioral explanations, which is useful for user-centric policy design and intelligent transportation applications such as personalized traveler information.