Predicting Bike-Sharing Demand Using Random Forest

Abstract

Being able to accurately predict bike-sharing demand is important for Intelligent Transport Systems and traveler information systems. These challenges have been addressed in a number of cities worldwide. This article uses Random Forest (RF) and k-fold cross-validation to predict the hourly count of rental bikes (cnt/h) in the city of Seoul (Korea) using information related to rental hour, temperature, humidity, wind speed, visibility, dewpoint, solar radiation, snowfall, and rainfall. The performance of the proposed RF model is evaluated using three statistical measurements: root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and correlation coefficient (R). The results show that the RF model has high predictive accuracy with an RMSE of 210 cnt/h, an MAE of 121 cnt/h, and an R of 0.90. The performance of the RF model is also compared with a linear regression model and shows superior accuracy.