Abstract
This paper is concerned with assessing goodness of fit of gravity models. The Chi-square test, or one of its asymptotic equivalents, is usually recommended for the purpose. A difficulty that frequently arises, particularly when working with urban travel data, is that the expected number of trips for most origin-destination(O-D) pairs are small. In order to test goodness of fit of gravity model, a simple approach, which depends on the number of O-D pairs and certain trip totals being large, is proposed in this paper. In addition, derivation of variance of Chi-square ratio is proposed to test the confidence interval of Chi-square ratio and application of its results with simulated data set is made to verify the usefulness of the results.