Short-Term Prediction of Passenger Demand in Multi-Zone Level: Temporal Convolutional Neural Network With Multi-Task Learning

Abstract

Accurate short-term passenger demand prediction contributes to the coordination of traffic supply and demand. This paper proposes an end-to-end multi-task learning temporal convolutional neural network (MTL-TCNN) to predict the short-term passenger demand in a multi-zone level. Along with a feature selector named spatiotemporal dynamic time warping (ST-DTW) algorithm, this proposed MTL-TCNN is quite qualified for the multi-task prediction problem with the consideration of spatiotemporal correlations. Then, based on the car-calling demand data from Didi Chuxing, Chengdu, China, and taxi demand data from the New York City, the numerical results show that the MTL-TCNN outperforms both classic methods (i.e., historical average (HA), <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">v</i> -support vector machine ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">v</i> -SVM), and XGBoost) and the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches [e.g., long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM)] in both the single task learning (STL) and multi-task learning (MTL) scenarios. In summary, the proposed MTL-TCNN with the ST-DTW algorithm is a promising method for short-term passenger demand prediction in a multi-zone level.