Grouping of Peopleto for Use of Public Transportation, Using Hierarchical Cluster Analysis(Case Study: Ardebil City)

The purpose of this paper is to propose a clustering method that Groups the people for use of public transportation. One of the principal measures that public transport administrations are following for reaching asustainable transportation in the cities consists on attract a higher number of citizens towards the use of publictransport modes, by offering high quality services. That is why public transport services have to prove themselves their competition with private vehicle and become the support for the movement of passengers, instead of act only as a possible alternative. This stratification usually is conducted based on the social anddemographic characteristics of the passengers. However, there are more advance techniques that permits toidentify more homogeneous groups of users. One of these techniques is the Cluster Analysis, which is a data mining technique that can be used for segmenting the sample of passengers on groups that share some common characteristics.. For this reason, the aim of this work is to find groups of passengers that perceive the quality ofthe service, and to apply to this clusters a suitable statistic technique that permit us to discover which are the variables that more influence the passengers’ overall evaluation about the service. The comparison among the results of each cluster will show considerable differences.

Keywords:

Public transportation , Cluster analysis , hierarchical , services , group