Taxi Booking Mobile App Order Demand Prediction Based on Short-Term Traffic Forecasting

Abstract

The Didi Dache app is China’s biggest taxi booking mobile app and is popular in cities. Unsurprisingly, short-term traffic demand forecasting is critical to enabling Didi Dache to maximize use by drivers and ensure that riders can always find a car whenever and wherever they may need a ride. In this paper, a short-term traffic demand forecasting model, Wave SVM, is proposed. It combines the complementary advantages of Daubechies5 wavelets analysis and least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) models while it overcomes their respective shortcomings. This method includes four stages: in the first stage, original data are preprocessed; in the second stage, these data are decomposed into high-frequency and low-frequency series by wavelet; in the third stage, the prediction stage, the LS-SVM method is applied to train and predict the corresponding high-frequency and low-frequency series; in the last stage, the diverse predicted sequences are reconstructed by wavelet. The real taxi-hailing orders data are applied to evaluate the model’s performance and practicality, and the results are encouraging. The Wave SVM model, compared with the prediction error of state-of-the-art models, not only has the best prediction performance but also appears to be the most capable of capturing the nonstationary characteristics of the short-term traffic dynamic systems.