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Title: Predicting Taxi and Uber Demand in Cities: Approaching the Limit of Predictability
Utilizing large-scale urban data sets to predict taxi and Uber passengers demand in cities is valuable for designing better taxi dispatch system and improving taxi services. In this paper, we predict taxi and Uber demand using two real-world data sets. Our approach consists of two key steps. First, we use temporal-correlated entropy to measure the demand regularity and obtain the maximum predictability. Second, we implement and assess five well-known representative predictors (Markov, LZW, ARIMA, MLP and LSTM) in achieving the maximum predictability. The results show that, on average, the maximum predictability can be as high as 83%, indicating a high temporal regularity of taxi demand in cities. In areas with low maximum predictability ( Πmax<0.83 ), the deep learning predictor LSTM can achieve high prediction accuracy by capturing hidden long-term temporal dependency. In areas with high maximum predictability ( Πmax⩾0.83 ), the Markov predictor can infer taxi demand with 86% accuracy, 14% better than LSTM, while requiring only 0.02% computation time. These findings suggest that the maximum predictability can help determine which predictor to use in terms of the accuracy and computational costs.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1827505
PAR ID:
10185775
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
ISSN:
1041-4347
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 1
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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