Forecasting primary delay recovery of high-speed railway using multiple linear regression, supporting vector machine, artificial neural network, and random forest regression

Accurate prediction of recoverable train delay can support the train dispatchers’ decision-making with timetable rescheduling and improving service reliability. In this paper, we present the results of an effort aimed to develop primary delay recovery (PDR) predictor model using train operation records from Wuhan-Guangzhou (W-G) high-speed railway. To this end, we first identified the main variables that contribute to delay, including dwell buffer time, running buffer time, magnitude of primary delay time, and individual sections’ influence. Different models are applied and calibrated to predict the PDR. The validation results on test datasets indicate that the random forest regression (RFR) model outperforms the other three alternative models, namely, multiple linear regression (MLR), support vector machine (SVM), and artificial neural networks (ANN) regarding prediction accuracy measure. Specifically, the evaluation results show that when the prediction tolerance is less than 1 min, the RFR model can achieve up to 80.4% of prediction accuracy, while the accuracy level is 44.4%, 78.5%, and 78.5% for MLR, SVM, and ANN models, respectively.