For the final project in scalable machine learning (id2223) at KTH, we added live delay predictions to an existing public transport information system that we built in a previous course. Our prediction system gets only a stream of realtime vehicle positions and a scheduled timetable. It extracts from that the true arrival times at past stops and predicts the delay for all future stops in the trip.

transitmap.io is an interactive realtime visualisation of all public transport in Sweden (or those parts of it that have realtime geolocations, anyway).

id2223.transitmap.io is a new version of Transitmap that we heavily modified and extended for the final course project in scalable machine learning at KTH.

This work included collecting a large dataset from the continuous stream of position updates and metadata, implementing a fully modular machine learning pipeline for the delay prediction, and integrating that with the existing architecture of Transitmap. In the following we will describe our data, our architecture, and our prediction model.

The specific prediction problem that we are solving is to predict the delta between the scheduled arrival time and the real arrival time for all future stops for all running metros in Stockholm. In other words, we are predicting future delays (and early arrivals) for metros that are currently on their way at any given time.

We are working with the public transport data available from Trafiklab for all of Sweden. This includes timetable data including metadata, as well as a stream of realtime vehicle position updates for many transport agencies. The timetable is in the static GTFS data format and is updates once per day. The realtime position updates are a data stream with new events every 3 seconds. On average this stream delivers over 4000 events per second and over 100 Million events per day.

Our custom event processing engine combines information from these two datasources in realtime to get a continuous stream of position updates joined with all relevant metadata. This combined stream serves as the input for our feature pipeline. We collected the whole stream for 3 weeks, totalling over 2.5 Billion events (~1TB uncompressed json). This dataset was the input for our batch feature pipeline. After that, our continuous feature pipeline is now continuously extracting new training samples from the data stream for future model iterations.

We built a completely modular machine learning architecture for transitmap, following the best practices we learned in the course.

The below diagram shows transitmap's architecture, including the dataflow through the system. Components colored in green are completely new and were added as part of this course project. Components colored in yellow existed previously, but were changed in a major way for this course project.

In order to be able to train a deep learning model on our laptops, we decided to scale down the prediction problem. For this iteration the predictions are limited to metros only (instead of all vehicles, as was planned initially). To generate training features from the previously collected data, we essentially simulated all public transport traffic from the 04.12.2023 to the 25.12.23 by pushing the collected events through the whole system in accelerated time. From this we extracted 3561 data samples.

The entire feature pipeline is implemented in Rust, within Transitmap's larger event processing pipeline. Previously this pipeline only attached the pre-aggregated metadata like the route name and trip headsign to each event. Now, the pipeline uses the raw vehicle coordinates, as well as the trip's timetable, to detect when a stop is reached. The feature pipeline collects this information for each trip in memory and transforms it into a sequence of tokens for training or inference.

Because we are working with sequence data, our model is a Recurrent Neural Network for a Sequence to Sequence prediction. We model our prediction problem similar to a language model, where the prediction task is to predict the next word. In our vocabulary we encode relevant metadata like route, direction, day-of-the-week, time-of-day as well as stop identifiers and stop to stop delay deltas in 1 minute increments between -15 and 15. The sequences start with the metadata for the specific trip and continoue with each stop and delay delta interleaved. During inference we provide all the realtime information up to the current stop in the trip and let the model predict the delay for the rest of the sequence.

We trained a number of models with different dimensions, the below table shows the notable examples that performed best at each model size.

We can see in the above table that the model size plays a central role in model performance. We find the tokens / parameter metric especially interesting to gather an intuition on how much training data is required for this specific model architecture and prediction problem. We found the best model performance at ~2.2 tokens per parameter, which is interesting for two reasons:

• It is much lower than the roughly 10 tokens / parameter that is typical in LLMs. We think this is because our sequences are much more consistently structured than natural language.
• Because of the structure of our sequences, we end up with roughly 1 delay token / parameter, which seems to make intuitive sense to us in this delay prediction problem.

The following diagram shows the layers and dimensions of our best model.

Transitmap can run locally using docker-compose. This requires a small amount of setup, as follows.

To run Transitmap yourself, you need to provide your own API keys from TrafikLab. This is completely free of charge. Follow these steps to set it up:

1. Login or create an account on TrafikLab.
2. Create a new project in your TrafikLab account.
3. Add API keys for the GTFS Sweden Realtime (beta) and GTFS Sweden Static data (beta) APIs to your project.
4. Create a file named .env in the root directory of this project and add your API keys to it. It should look like the following.

TRAFIKLAB_GTFS_RT_KEY=<realtime-api-key>
TRAFIKLAB_GTFS_STATIC_KEY=<static-data-api-key>

Note that, while the API keys you have just set up are are perfectly fine for testing, they not enough to run Transitmap continuously. For this, the Guld API tier is required on the realtime API. This can also be requested from TrafikLab free of charge, but processing the request typically takes a couple days.

1. Login or create an account on Hopsworks
2. Follow the instructions to finish account creation
3. Find your API key in the profile menu

HOPSWORKS_API_KEY=<hopsworks-api-key>

Note that the free tier should be enouph to support the feature pipeline for quite a long time.

Once you have set up your API keys, you can simply run Transitmap with the following command.

docker-compose up --build

The cluster takes a couple minutes to start fully. Once everything is running, you can connect to the application in your browser on localhost.

We recommend running without the feature uploader and the data exporter, since these require private credentials for Google Cloud Storage access. They are not required for just running the application and are commented out in the compose file by default.