RST-Net: a spatio-temporal residual network based on Region-reConStruction algorithm for shared bike prediction

Abstract

As a new form of public transportation, shared bikes have greatly facilitated people’s travel in recent years. However, in the actual operation process, the uneven distribution of bicycles at each shared bicycle station has limited the travel experience. In this paper, we propose a deep spatio-temporal residual network model based on Region-reConStruction algorithm to predict the usage of shared bikes in the bike-sharing system. We first propose an Region-reConStruction algorithm (RCS) to partition the shared bicycle sites within a city into separate areas based on their geographic location information as well as bikes’ migration trends between stations. We then combine the RCS algorithm with a deep spatio-temporal residual network to model the key factors affecting the usage of shared bicycles. RCS makes good use of the migration trend of shared bikes during user usage, thus greatly improving the accuracy of prediction. Experiments performed on New York’s bike-sharing system show that our model’s prediction accuracy is significantly better than that of previous models.