CoDriver ETA: Combine Driver Information in Estimated Time of Arrival by Driving Style Learning Auxiliary Task

Abstract

Estimated time of arrival (ETA) is one of the most important services in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Precise ETA ensures proper travel scheduling of passengers as well as guarantees efficient decision-making on ride-hailing platforms, which are used by an explosively growing number of people in the past few years. Recently, machine learning-based methods have been widely adopted to solve this time estimation problem and become state-of-the-art. However, they do not well explore the personalization information, as many drivers are short of personalized data and do not have sufficient trajectory data in real applications. This data sparsity problem prevents existing methods from obtaining higher prediction accuracy. In this article, we propose a novel deep learning method to solve this problem. We introduce an auxiliary task to learn an embedding of the personalized driving information under multi-task learning framework. In this task, we discriminatively learn the embedding of driving preference that preserves the historical statistics of driving speed. For this purpose, we adapt the triplet network from face recognition to learn the embedding by constructing triplets in the feature space. This simultaneously learned embedding can effectively boost the prediction accuracy of the travel time. We evaluate our method on two large-scale real-world datasets from Didi Chuxing platform. The extensive experimental results on billions of historical vehicle travel data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.