Identifying Latent Classes of Pedestrian Crowd Evacuees

Abstract

The tactical decision making of humans when they exit crowded built environments was investigated. Recent studies have shown that the relative weights and priorities that pedestrian evacuees associate with different factors contributing to their choice of exit vary significantly from person to person, yet this heterogeneity is not explainable by the demographics of the decision makers, such as gender. Hence, it is assumed that the choice could be attributable to the presence of latent classes (latent types of behavior) unassociated with observable demographic characteristics. The standard latent class and the random coefficient latent class choice models were implemented with data on stated ..