Taxi-demand forecasting using dynamic spatiotemporal analysis

Abstract

Taxi-demand forecasting and hotspot prediction can be critical in reducing response times and designing a cost effective online taxi-booking model. Taxi demand in a region can be predicted by considering the past demand accumulated in that region over a span of time. However, other covariates—like neighborhood influence, sociodemographic parameters, and point-of-interest data—may also influence the spatiotemporal variation of demand. To study the effects of these covariates, in this paper, we propose three models that consider different covariates in order to select a set of independent variables. These models predict taxi demand in spatial units for a given temporal resolution using linear and ensemble regression. We eventually combine the characteristics (covariates) of each of these models to propose a robust forecasting framework which we call the combined covariates model (CCM). Experimental results show that the CCM performs better than the other models proposed in this paper.