Examining parking occupancy prediction models: a comparative analysis

Parking is a persistent challenge in urban areas, especially on college campuses, as limited parking spaces and increasing vehicular traffic are at the forefront of campus administrators' concerns. Lack of parking availability leads to frustration among students, faculty, and staff and results in increased traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and reduced overall productivity. Accurate prediction of parking occupancy plays a vital role in optimizing parking resource allocation, minimizing congestion, and improving the overall campus experience. Thus, this study comprehensively analyzes parking occupancy predictions for a college campus garage, using several different models. The dataset spans from January 2022 to March 2023, providing insights into the models' performance for more than one year. The research aims to utilize random forest, decision tree, linear regression, and support vector regression (SVR) models and compare their effectiveness, using evaluation metrics such as root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and R-squared (R²). Random forest outperformed decision tree, SVR and linear regression models in terms of accuracy, as indicated by the lower MAE values. Additionally, random forest achieved a better classification performance, and a higher R² suggests a stronger correlation between the predicted and actual occupancy values. Conversely, SVR displayed the weakest performance among the four models, with a high MAE and negative R² value. The findings of this research will aid in improving parking management systems and contribute to the development of efficient and sustainable parking solutions on college campuses and in urban areas.