Forecasting BART Ridership: SARIMA vs Prophet

A couple of <a href="https://medium.com/@atmikapai/a-journey-through-bart-ridership-trends-5cfdd0819c0c" rel="noopener">articles</a> prior, I conducted an exploratory analysis of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) ridership trends from 1998 to Aug 2023 on weekdays vs weekends, isolated most popular stations pre and post-pandemic, and calibrated pandemic ridership recovery across counties. Today, I want to forecast BART ridership trends till 2027, because there are no additional additional BART stations built till then. In 2028, BART plans to add four new stations in Santa Clara County. I will use SARIMA and Prophet forecasting tools to predict ridership at the end of 2027. I will run these two models on a train and test set to speak to their performance and reliability. Before we dig into the analysis, let’s revisit average weekday and weekend ridership from 1998 to 2023. Weekday ridership constitutes ~85% of total ridership, so I will focus on this segment going forward. <a href="https://medium.com/@atmikapai/forecasting-bart-ridership-sarmix-vs-prophet-8fdfae5f24bc">Click Here</a>