Taxi fare prediction based on multiple machine learning models

Abstract

The use of taxis as a fundamental mode of transportation in everyday life has led to the increased popularity of various ride-hailing applications such as Uber and Lyft, enabling users to conveniently request and view the predicted fare for their desired destination. Accurately predicting the fare is thus of significant importance. In this study, machine learning models were employed to forecast taxi fares based on factors such as distance and passenger count. As the initial data only contained latitude and longitude values, the Haversine formula was utilized to calculate the distance between two locations. Moreover, the raw data was plagued with inconsistencies such as negative fares and grossly exaggerated distances, which were resolved by implementing four data cleaning criteria. Following the preprocessing stage, three distinct models (i.e., linear regression, decision tree, and random forest) were trained and evaluated using the root mean square error metric. The results indicated that the random forest model produced the smallest error (1.264), followed by the decision tree model with a similar error rate (1.277), and lastly, the linear regression model with the highest error (1.718). Thus, the random forest model demonstrated superior performance and is recommended for accurate fare predictions.