Emerging transportation modes, including car-sharing, bike-sharing, and ride-hailing, are transforming urban mobility yet have been shown to reinforce socioeconomic inequity. These services rely on accurate demand prediction, but the demand data on which these models are trained reflect biases around demographics, socioeconomic conditions, and entrenched geographic patterns. To address these biases and improve fairness, we present FairST, a fairness-aware demand prediction model for spatiotemporal urban applications, with emphasis on new mobility. We use 1D (time-varying, space-constant), 2D (space-varying, time-constant) and 3D (both time- and space-varying) convolutional branches to integrate heterogeneous features, while including fairness metrics as a form of regularization to improve equity across demographic groups. We propose two spatiotemporal fairness metrics, region-based fairness gap (RFG), applicable when demographic information is provided as a constant for a region, and individual-based fairness gap (IFG), applicable when a continuous distribution of demographic information is available. Experimental results on bike share and ride share datasets show that FairST can reduce inequity in demand prediction for multiple sensitive attributes (i.e. race, age, and education level), while achieving better accuracy than even state-of-the-art fairness-oblivious methods.
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FairST: Equitable Spatial and Temporal Demand Prediction for New Mobility Systems
We present a fairness-aware model for predicting demand for new mobility systems. Our approach, called FairST, consists of 1D, 2D and 3D convolutions to learn the spatial-temporal dynamics of a mobility system, and fairness regularizers that guide the model to make equitable predictions. We propose two fairness metrics, region-based fairness gap (RFG) and individual-based fairness gap (IFG), that measure equity gaps between social groups for new mobility systems. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model: FairST not only reduces the fairness gap by more than 80%, but achieves better accuracy than state-of-the-art but fairness-oblivious methods including LSTMs, ConvLSTMs, and 3D CNN.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10188254
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGSPATIAL '19: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
- Volume:
- November 2019
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 552 to 555
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3347146.3359380
