Abstract
This research paper investigates methodologies for forecasting the demand for railway tickets, a crucial aspect of optimizing resource allocation, enhancing service quality, and increasing revenue in railway transportation systems. The study explores various time series analysis techniques, including ARIMA, SARIMAX, and neural networks such as LSTM and CNN, to predict ticket demand. Railway ticket sales data spanning several years was utilized to train and validate the models. The performance of each model was evaluated based on key metrics like Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Demand is usually defined in Origin-Destination (OD) matrices, which represent movements from the origin station to the destination station for all OD pairs. The proposed CNN model predicts the OD matrix, whereas other models predict demand for each OD pair separately. Findings indicate that the CNN model gives more accurate predictions compared to ARIMA, SARIMAX, and LSTM models. Hence, interdependencies between various OD pairs allow for a more holistic and accurate prediction model.