Finding causes of irregular headways integrating data mining and AHP

Irregular headways could reduce the public transit service level heavily. Finding out the exact causes of irregular headways will greatly help to develop efficient strategies aiming to improve transit service quality. This paper utilizes bus GPS data of Harbin to evaluate the headway performance and proposes a statistical method to identify the abnormal headways. Association mining is used to dig deeper and recognize six causes of bus bunching. The AHP, embedded data analysis, is applied to determine the weight of each cause in the case of that these causes are combined with each other constantly. Results show that the front bus has a greater effect on bus bunching than the following bus, and the traffic condition is the most critical factor affecting bus headway.