Exploring Deep Learning Approaches for Short-Term Passenger Demand Prediction

Abstract

An accurate short-term passenger demand forecast makes a contribution to the coordination of traffic supply and demand. Forecasting the short-term passenger demand for the on-demand transportation service platform is of utmost significance since it might incentivize empty cars to relocate from over-supply regions to over-demand regions. Yet, because spatial, temporal, and exogenous dependencies need to be evaluated concurrently, short-term passenger demand forecasting may be rather difficult. This article aims to investigate several methods that can be utilized to forecast short-term traffic demand, with a primary emphasis on deep learning approaches. We examine varying degrees of temporal aggregation and how these levels affect various architectural configurations. In addition, by analyzing 22 models representing 5 distinct architectural configurations, we illustrate the influence of varying layer configurations within each architecture. The findings indicate that the long-term short memory (LSTM) structures perform the best for short-term time series forecasting, but more complex architectures do not significantly enhance the outcomes. Moreover, considering the spatiotemporal aspects results in an improvement in the prediction of more than fifty percent. In addition, we investigate the vectorization of time, also known as Time2Vec, as a way of embedding to make it possible for a selected algorithm to recognize periodic characteristics in time series, and we show that the outcome is improved by fifteen percent.