Taxi Demand and Fare Prediction with Hybrid Models: Enhancing Efficiency and User Experience in City Transportation

Abstract

An essential part of a city’s transportation infrastructure, taxis allow for regular encounters between drivers and customers. Nevertheless, there are issues with efficiency since there is an imbalance in the supply and demand for taxis. This study describes the creation of a platform that serves both customers and taxi drivers by offering immediate forecasts of demand and fare. Root mean squared error (RMSE) of 3.31 and a negative log-likelihood of −3.84, the long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN) with the mixture density network (MDN) is employed to forecast taxi demand. The best RMSE of 3.24 is obtained for fare prediction via an ensemble learning model that integrates linear regression (LR), ridge regression (RR), and multilayer perceptron (MLP). To ensure peak performance, the models are systematically created, implemented, trained, and improved. By integrating these models into a web application interface, the taxi service system offers a better overall user experience, which improves urban mobility.