Beginning our Series on Forecasting with Data-Driven Models

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After presenting a data-driven modeling prototype at the 2016 Innovations in Travel Modeling Conference, some asserted that it could not be used in forecasting. Nothing could be further from the truth. We admit, though, that forecasting would perhaps not be in the way we have traditionally done so. Josie Kressner and I put together a presentation to illustrate the wide range of approaches that can be used with data-driven models (or any other type of model, for that matter) at the TRB Transportation Planning Applications Conference this week. Cramming it all into a 15-minute presentation necessitated firehosing the audience with ideas, but few concrete examples were included. So we are going to write a series of blog posts here that discuss each of them in more detail.

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TRB ITM Presentation — Recap

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Two weeks ago today, Rick Donnelly of WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff and Josie Kressner of Transport Foundry presented a case study at the 2016 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Innovations in Travel Modeling Conference in Denver, Colorado. Co-author Greg Macfarlane of WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff also presented this work last week at the North Carolina Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (NCAMPO) in Greensboro, North Carolina.

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Introducing censusr

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Here at Transport Foundry we regularly use data from the U.S. Census Bureau to validate our input data and our simulation engine outputs. To make this task easier for us, we wrote an R package that downloads data from the U.S. Census Bureau directly into a user's R environment. We have published this package – censusr – on CRAN under an open-source license. We hope others can use it to streamline their analyses. Contributions to the source code are welcome on GitHub.

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