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Metrohelper: A Real-time Web-based System for Metro Incident Detection Using Social Media

In recent years the usage of public transit services has been rapidly increased, thanks to huge progress on network technologies. However, the disruptions in modern public transit services also increased, due to aging infrastructure, non-comprehensive system design and the needs for maintenance. Any disruptions happened in current transit networks can cause to major disasters on passengers who use these networks for their daily commutes. Although we have lots of usage on transit network, still most current disruptions detection systems either lack of network coverage or did not have real-time system. The goal of this thesis was to create a system that can leverage Twitter data to help in detecting service disruptions in their early stage. This work involves a web applications which contains front-end, back-end and database, along with data mining techniques that obtain Tweets from a live Twitter stream related to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) metro system. The fundamental features of the system includes real-time incidents panel, historical events review, activities search near specific metro station and recent news review, which allowing people to have more relatively information based on their needs. After the initial functionalities is being settled, we further developed storytelling and sentiment analysis applications, which allowed people have more comprehensive information about the incidents that are happened around metro stations. Also, with the emergency report we developed, the developer can have immediate notification when an urgent event occurred. After fully testified the system's case study on storytelling, sentiment analysis and emergency report, the outcomes are extreme convincing and trustworthy. / Master of Science / As public transit network become more and more accessible, people around the world rely on these network for their daily commutes. It is clearly that service disruptions among these system will affect passengers severely, especially when there are more and more people using it. This thesis is dedicated to build a web application that will not only allowing people to search latest information, but also assisting on the early detection of the disruptions. In this work we have developed an web application which has easy to use user interface, along with data mining techniques that connected with live data from Twitter to identify these disruptions. Our website is a real-time platform that contains real-time incidents panel, historical events review, activities search near specific metro station and recent news review based on latest tweets and news. By collecting live data from Twitter and various news website, we further developed storytelling and sentiment analysis features. For storytelling, we applied a machine learning model to help us clustering the related tweets/news, after summarize and track the evolution of tweets/news, we converted into stories and displayed it with interactive timelines. For sentiment analysis, we integrated a machine learning model which will scaled the emotional strength of tweets/news, then show the feelings of particular tweets/news. Additionally, we create an emergency report functionality, since it is important for the authority to where and when the incidents happened as soon as possible. The outcome of the system has been well-testify based on the daily case studies, and the results not only meet the ground truth, but also provide with various information.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110349
Date26 May 2022
CreatorsChen, Chih Fang
ContributorsComputer Science, Lu, Chang Tien, Reddy, Chandan K., Cho, Jin-Hee
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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