Nodes from the Underground: Causal and Probabilistic Approaches for Complex Transportation Networks

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An efficient transportation system is vital to the economic and social well-being of large cities. The transport demand implied by economic growth, however, requires transport networks to become more and more complex, making their management difficult. Fortunately, modern systems such as the London Underground generate vast amounts of data that can be analysed to better understand passenger behaviour and needs. Besides understanding the typical daily patterns that we can observe on a regular basis, Data Science methods allows us to look into in the less usual events such as unplanned disruptions that are still important to any user, and to also model individualised behaviour instead of only aggregates. In a large system such as the London Underground, signal failures and disruptive events eventually take place, requiring passengers to change plans in a variety of ways. This research provides advanced statistical modelling and machine learning approaches to learn from past events to examine how passengers adapt themselves when a disruption occurs. When a disruption takes place, the model will provide information of likely changes, such as increased number of passengers leaving a station because they could not reach their destination. These models are important for transport authorities to understand the resilience of the system, different combinations of location and time of a disruption, and unusual responses from passengers that may motivate different communication strategies to inform users of better travel adjustments. This research also opens up conceptual ideas to be exploited in the future using new technologies to monitor and adaptively respond to passenger needs in a more optimised and time-effective way.