Prateek Bansal

Biography

Dr Prateek Bansal is a Presidential Young (Assistant) Professor who joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in December 2021. Before joining NUS, he was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Imperial College London. Dr Bansal leads the Behavioural Cognitive Science (BeCoS) lab at NUS. His group develops novel methods at the intersection of AI, Econometrics, Causal Inference, and Psychology to nudge and forecast mobility behaviour and the adoption of emerging technologies at an individual level and urban scale.

Qualifications

• PhD, Transportation Engineering (Minor: Statistics and Econometrics), Cornell University, USA, 2016-2019
• MS, Transportation Engineering (Minor: Statistical Modelling), The University of Texas at Austin, USA, 2013-2015
• BTech, Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, 2008-2013

Position Held

• Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore, 2021 – Present
• Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, Imperial College London, UK, 2019-2021
• Exchange scholar, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, 2018
• Exchange scholar, University of California, Berkeley, USA, 2018
• Visting researcher, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2015
• Research intern, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2013
• Research intern, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada, 2012
• Research intern, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, 2012

Grants, Honours & Awards

• Certificate of Appreciation, Standing Committee on Travel Survey Methods (AEP25), 2024
• Best Paper Award, 17^th World Conference of Transport Research, Montreal, Canada, 2023
• Outstanding Paper Award, 40^th International Conference of Korean Society of Transport, 2022
• Presidential Young Professorship, National University of Singapore, 2021
• Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, UK, 2020
• Exchange Research Grant, Cornell University, 2018
• Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship, Honourable Mention, 2018
• David Bruton Graduate Fellowship, the University of Texas at Austin, 2015
• Texas Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Scholarship, 2015
• Multiple travel awards by NSF, SIAM, IIF, Fields Institute, & World Bank (~US$26,000), 2015-2018
• Abhinav Dhupar Memorial Award, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, 2013

Professional Activities 

• Elected board member, International Association of Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR), 2024-2027
• Handling Editor, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2023-2026
• Associate Editor, Journal of Public Transportation, 2023-2026
• Associate Editor, Journal of Transport and Economic Policy, 2023-2026
• Editorial Board Member, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2023-2026
• Editorial Board Member, Data Science in Transportation, 2023-2026
• Guest Editor, Transportation (Special issue of IATBR 2024), 2023-2024
• Editorial Advisory Board Member, Journal of Choice Modelling, 2023-2025
• Standing Committee, Travel Survey Methods (AEP25), Transportation Research Board, 2023-2026
• Standing Committee, Travel Forecasting (AEP50), Transportation Research Board, 2023-2026
• Program Committee Member, 8^th International Conference on Choice Modelling, 2023-2024

Invited Seminars

• Invited seminars at the Kyoto University, University of Washington, Northwestern & NYU, 2024
• Invited expert on Carsharing, CNA’s Talking Point. (see video here, 219,000 views), 2023
• Invited panelist, Urban Solutions and Sustainability R&D Congress, Singapore. 2023
• Keynote speaker, 22^nd Summer School of Behavior Modeling 2023, University of Tokyo, 2023
• Invited speaker, a webinar by International Association for Travel Behavior Research, 2023
• Invited speaker, Electric Vehicle Forum, Land Transport Authority, Singapore, 2023
• Invited speaker, a webinar on the Future of Road Safety, Institution of Engineers, Singapore, 2023
• Keynote speaker, 14^th International Conference on Traffic & Granular Flow, India, 2022
• Invited speaker, a webinar at Southwest Jiaotong University, China, 2022
• Invited panellist, a webinar by Transportation Research Group, India. 2022
• Invited panellist, Centre of Excellence on Safety Engineering & Analytics, IIT Kharagpur, 2022

Research Interests 

The main themes of the BeCoS lab are summarized below:

Individual-level Modelling:
1. Data-driven Choice Models
2. Modelling Neurophysiological Data
3. Built Environment and Human Perception

System-level Modelling:
1. Data-driven Activity-based Modelling
2. Causal Inference for Urban Systems
3. Adaptive Infrastructure Planning

Selected Publications

1. Bansal, Prateek, Eui-Jin Kim, and Semra Ozdemir. “Discrete choice experiments with eye-tracking: How far we have come and ways forward.” Journal of Choice Modelling 51 (2024): 100478.
2. Huo, Jinghai, Rubal Dua, and Prateek Bansal. “Inverse product differentiation logit model: Holy grail or not?.” Energy Economics (2024): 107379.
3. Kim, Eui-Jin, and Prateek Bansal. “A deep generative model for feasible and diverse population synthesis.” Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 148 (2023): 104053.
4. Krueger, Rico, Michel Bierlaire, Thomas Gasos, and Prateek Bansal. “Robust discrete choice models with t-distributed kernel errors.” Statistics and Computing 33, no. 1 (2023): 2.
5. Krueger, Rico, Michel Bierlaire, and Prateek Bansal. “A data fusion approach for ride-sourcing demand estimation: A discrete choice model with sampling and endogeneity corrections.” Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 152 (2023): 104180.
6. Bansal, Prateek, Daniel Hörcher, and Daniel J. Graham. “A dynamic choice model to estimate the user cost of crowding with large scale transit data.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (2022): 1-25.
7. Bansal, Prateek, and Rubal Dua. “Fuel consumption elasticities, rebound effect and feebate effectiveness in the Indian and Chinese new car markets.” Energy Economics 113 (2022): 106192.
8. Gurumurthy Krishna, Prateek Bansal, Kara M. Kockelman, and Zili Li. “Modelling animal-vehicle collision counts across large networks using a Bayesian Hierarchical model with time-varying parameters.” Analytic Methods in Accident Research (2022): 100231.
9. Dubey, Subodh, Ishant Sharma, Sabyasachee Mishra, Oded Cats, and Prateek Bansal. “A General Framework to Forecast the Adoption of Novel Products: A Case of Autonomous Vehicles.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 165(2022):63-95.
10. Dubey, Subodh, Oded Cats, Serge Hoogendoorn, and Prateek Bansal. “A Multinomial Probit Model with Choquet Integral and Attribute Cut-offs.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 148(2022): 140-163.
11. Anupriya, Graham, Daniel J., and Prateek Bansal. “Modelling the Propagation of Infectious Disease via Transportation Networks.” Nature Scientific Report, 12, 20572 (2022).
12. Bansal, Prateek, Vahid Keshavarzzadeh, Angelo Guevara, Ricardo A. Daziano, and Shanjun Li. Designed quadrature to approximate integrals in maximum simulated likelihood estimation.” The Econometrics Journal 25, no. 2 (2022): 301-321.
13. Buddhavarapu, Prasad*, Prateek Bansal*, and Jorge A. Prozzi. “A new spatial count data model with time-varying parameters.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 150(2021): 566-586.
14. Bansal, Prateek*, Rico Krueger*, and Daniel J. Graham. “Fast Bayesian estimation of spatial count data models.” Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 157 (2021): 107152.
15. Bansal, Prateek*, Rico Krueger*, Michel Bierlaire, Ricardo A. Daziano, and Taha H. Rashidi. “Bayesian estimation of mixed multinomial logit models: Advances & simulation-based evaluations.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 131(2020): 124-142.