Performance Comparison of Public Bike Demand Predictions: The Impact of Weather and Air Pollution

Many metropolitan cities motivate people to exploit public bike-sharing programs as alternative transportation for many reasons. Due to its’ popularity, multiple types of research on optimizing public bike-sharing systems is conducted on city-level, neighborhood-level, station-level, or user-level to predict the public bike demand. Previously, the research on the public bike demand prediction primarily focused on discovering a relationship with weather as an external factor that possibly impacted the bike usage or analyzing the bike user trend in one aspect. This work hypothesizes two external factors that are likely to affect public bike demand: weather and air pollution. This study uses a public bike data set, daily temperature, precipitation data, and air condition data to discover the trend of bike usage using multiple machine learning techniques such as Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, and Random Forest. After conducting the research, each algorithm’s output is evaluated with performance comparisons such as accuracy, precision, or sensitivity. As a result, Random Forest is an efficient classifier for the bike demand prediction by weather and precipitation, and Decision Tree performs best for the bike demand prediction by air pollutants. Also, the three class labelings in the daily bike demand has high specificity, and is easy to trace the trend of the public bike system.