Trip misreporting forecast using count data model in a GPS enhanced travel survey

Abstract

As Global Positioning System (GPS) technology advances, it has been increasingly used to supplement traditional self-reported travel surveys due to its promising features in capturing travel data with better accuracy and reliability. Realizing the limitations of diary-based surveys, this paper presents a study that directly accounts for trip misreporting behavior in trip generation models. Travel data were obtained from prompted-recall assisted GPS survey along with a diary-based survey. Negative Binomial models for count data were developed to accommodate misreporting behavior by introducing interaction effects of the sample-indicator variable with various personal and household variables. The interaction effects indicate how the impacts of the socioeconomic and demographic variables on trip-making vary across the two samples. Assuming that the GPS sample represents the ground truth, the interaction effects actually capture the likelihood and the extent of trip misreporting by detailed personal and household characteristics. The model results reveal significant interaction effects of several personal and household variables, indicating misreporting behavior associated with these attributes. The addition of interaction coefficients to the main effect model represents the real impacts of the independent variables, after compensating for trip misreporting behavior, if any.