Abstract
The catchment area along a bus route is key in predicting bus journeys. In particular, the aggregated number of households within the catchment area are used in the prediction model. The model uses other factors, such as head-way, day-of-week and others. The focus of this study was to classify types of catchment areas and analyse the impact of varying their sizes on the quality of predicting the number of bus passengers. Machine Learning techniques: Random Forest, Neural Networks and C5.0 Decision Trees, were compared regarding solution quality of predictions. The study discusses the sensitivity of catchment area size variations. Bus routes in the county Surrey in the United Kingdom were used to test the quality of the methods. The findings show that the quality of predicting bus journeys depends on the size of the catchment area.