Frequentist and bayesian approaches for understanding route choice of drivers under stop-and-go traffic

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Neeraj Saxena - , University of New South Wales (Author)
  • Ruiyang Wang - , University of New South Wales (Author)
  • Vinayak V. Dixit - , University of New South Wales (Author)
  • S. Travis Waller - , Chair of Transport Modelling and Simulation, Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation, University of New South Wales (Author)

Abstract

Driving in congested traffic is a nuisance that not only results in longer travel times, but also triggers frustration and impatience among drivers. A few studies have modeled the effects of congested traffic in the resulting route choice behavior of car drivers. The studies used frequentist models such as discrete choice models to analyze large samples. However, these studies did not compare the inferences obtained from the frequentist and Bayesian approaches, particularly for datasets which are not sufficiently large. It has been shown by researchers that Bayesian models perform well, especially when the sample size is small. Thus, this paper develops and compares a multinomial logit (frequentist) and a Naïve Bayes (Bayesian) model on a mid-sized dataset of size around 100 participants which was obtained from a driving simulator experiment to understand driver’s route choice under stop-and-go traffic. The results show that the prediction power of the Naïve Bayes model is much higher than the multinomial logit model (MNL). The Naïve Bayes model is also found to perform better than machine learning algorithms like the decision tree model. The findings from this study will be useful to researchers and practitioners as they should test both the approaches and select the appropriate model, particularly in the case of seemingly large datasets.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)371-382
Number of pages12
JournalTransportation research record
Volume2674
Issue number9
Publication statusPublished - 3 Jul 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-2939-2090/work/141543745