Predicting Delayed Train Trajectories on the Dutch Railway Network: Explainable AI Evaluation of Topological, Operational and Weather Features with Tree Based Ensemble Methods
Abstract: The reliable prediction of passenger train delays is a critical component of railway management. While contemporary research frequently attempts to maximize absolute accuracy by deploying opaque deep learning architectures, the underlying data mechanics driving longitudinal predictive decay remain underexplored. Consequently, this study provides an explainable temporal robustness analysis of network-wide railway delay prediction. Focusing on the Dutch railway network, this research utilizes interpretable tree-based ensembles to integrate granular topological, environmental, and operational features. The overarching finding establishes that while feature-rich tree-based models improve simultaneous (within-month) prediction, predictive performance systematically degrades when evaluated across non-simultaneous (future) months. Furthermore, multi-horizon SHAP and dispersion analyses explicitly link this degradation to environmental feature volatility and instability within the statistical target definition. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that richer feature sets alone are insufficient to resolve long-term forecasting constraints, underscoring the necessity to transition toward dynamic, season-aware architectures anchored by absolute operational boundaries.