A unified framework with multi-source data for predicting passenger demands of ride services

Ride-hailing applications have been offering convenient ride services for people in need. However, such applications still suffer from the issue of supply-demand disequilibrium, which is a typical problem for traditional taxi services. With effective predictions on passenger demands, we can alleviate the disequilibrium by predispatching, dynamic pricing or avoiding dispatching cars to zero-demand areas. Existing studies of demand predictions mainly utilize limited data sources, trajectory data, or orders of ride services or both of them, which also lacks a multi-perspective consideration. In this article, we present a unified framework with a new combined model and a road-network-based spatial partition to leverage multi-source data and model the passenger demands from temporal, spatial, and zero-demand-area perspectives. In addition, our framework realizes offline training and online predicting, which can satisfy the real-time requirement more easily. We analyze and evaluate the performance of our combined model using the actual operational data from UCAR. The experimental results indicate that our model outperforms baselines on both Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Square Error on average.