Abstract

The main task of this report is to determine whether the weather (more specifically the rain and snow) influences the length of the taxi trips in the city of Chicago. Moreover, the authors sought to assess the impact of the number of public chauffeurs, namely the number of taxi drivers, on the number of taxi rides. The authors discovered a significant influence of weather metrics on the trip length, but the presented model is not robust and has a very low prediction power. The relationship between the number of chauffeurs and the number of rides was found not to be significant, and yet, further analysis revealed that not all the methods lead to the same conclusions.

Introduction

The main task is a regression where we look at whether the weather (particularly the rain and snow) has an influence on the length of the trips in the city of Chicago, where we will use the time as the key for joining these two datasets. Furthermore, we will look at the public chauffeurs whose license has just been issued or renewed in order to measure the impact on the number of trips, hence raising the research question of whether more taxis mean more rides or not. For joining the former and the latter, we will create a table with the number of licenses that remain active during each month of 2018. To do so, we selected the licenses for which the original date of issue is before the beginning of that particular month and the expiration day is after the end of that month meaning that the original issue was before the considered period, and has not yet expired. Therefore, the key to join the public chauffeur dataset and the taxi rides is the month. We will do a thorough exploratory analysis using machine learning techniques for a regression task including linear models, a regression tree as well as a random forest.

• Question 1: Do weather conditions, particularly rainy days and high/low temperatures have a significant influence on the length of the trips in the city of Chicago?

• Question 2: Does the change in the number of public chauffeurs, depicted by the changes in licenses issued or renewed, have an impact on the number of taxi rides?

The year we will focus on and filter for is 2018.

Datasets

Weather dataset (365 entries)