RIDE: An Open Dataset and Benchmark for Train Delay Prediction
This work addresses the lack of standardized datasets and evaluation protocols in train delay prediction, providing a resource for the railway operations and research community.
RIDE provides a large-scale open dataset and benchmark for train delay prediction, covering 94.5M train events and 35.7M weather records from the Belgian railway network. The benchmark enables standardized evaluation, showing that learning-based models outperform non-learning ones, with graph neural networks achieving the best mean performance.
Train delay prediction is an important problem for both passengers and railway operators, yet progress in the field remains difficult to assess due to the lack of standardized datasets, prediction targets, and evaluation protocols. To address this gap, we introduce RIDE, an open dataset and benchmark for train delay prediction built at nationwide scale over the Belgian railway network. RIDE covers 94.5M train events, 3.6M journeys, and 35.7M weather records from 2023 to 2025. It is organized as a layered data pipeline from raw railway and weather sources to two public releases: a reusable intermediate relational dataset and model-ready benchmark datasets. The benchmark standardizes the prediction task and the training and testing data. It also provides a unified evaluation protocol that supports direct comparison across models. Using this framework, we provide the first comprehensive comparative evaluation of non-learning, statistical learning, and deep learning models. We show that learning-based methods clearly outperform non-learning models, with graph neural networks achieving the best mean performance, while the strongest learning-based models remain relatively close to one another. Beyond aggregate mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE), the framework also provides breakdowns by prediction horizon and delay change, enabling more detailed analysis of model behavior across forecasting regimes.