Probabilistic Dependency Networks for Prediction and Diagnostics

Research in transportation frequently involve modelling and predicting attributes of events that occur at regular intervals. The event could be arrival of a bus at a bus stop, the volume of a traffic at a particular point, the demand at a particular bus stop etc. In this work, the authors propose a specific implementation of probabilistic graphical models to learn the probabilistic dependency between the events that occur in a network. A dependency graph is built from the past observed instances of the event and the graph is used to understand the causal effects of some events on others in the system. The dependency graph is also used to predict the attributes of future events and is shown to have a good prediction accuracy compared to the state of the art.