The Simpler The Better: A Unified Approach to Predicting Original Taxi Demands based on Large-Scale Online Platforms
Abstract
Taxi-calling apps are gaining increasing popularity for their eficiency in dispatching idle taxis to passengers in need. To precisely balance the supply and the demand of taxis, online taxicab platforms need to predict the Unit Original Taxi Demand (UOTD), which refers to the number of taxi-calling requirements submitted per unit time (e.g., every hour) and per unit region (e.g., each POI). Predicting UOTD is non-trivial for large-scale industrial online taxicab platforms because both accuracy and fexibility are essential. Complex non-linear models such as GBRT and deep learning are generally accurate, yet require labor-intensive model redesign after scenario changes (e.g., extra constraints due to new regulations). To accurately predict UOTD while remaining fexible to scenario changes, we propose Lin UOTD, a unifed linear regression model with more than 200 million dimensions of features. The simple model structure eliminates the need of repeated model redesign, while the high-dimensional features contribute to accurate UOTD prediction. We further design a series of optimization techniques for eficient model training and updating. Evaluations on two largescale datasets from an industrial online taxicab platform verify that Lin UOTD outperforms popular non-linear models in accuracy. We envision our experiences to adopt simple linear models with high-dimensional features in UOTD prediction as a pilot study and can shed insights upon other industrial large-scale spatio-temporal prediction problems. © 2017 ACM. Show more
Publication status
publishedExternal links
Book title
Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD '17Volume
Pages / Article No.
Publisher
Association for Computing MachineryEvent
Subject
Feature engineering; Prediction; Unit original taxi demandsOrganisational unit
03429 - Thiele, Lothar (emeritus) / Thiele, Lothar (emeritus)
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