Multi-Regional Online Car-Hailing Order Quantity Forecasting Based on the Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

With the development of online cars, the demand for travel prediction is increasing in order to reduce the information asymmetry between passengers and drivers of online car-hailing. This paper proposes a travel demand forecasting model named OC-CNN based on the convolutional neural network to forecast the travel demand. In order to make full use of the spatial characteristics of the travel demand distribution, this paper meshes the prediction area and creates a travel demand data set of the graphical structure to preserve its spatial properties. Taking advantage of the convolutional neural network in image feature extraction, the historical demand data of the first twenty-five minutes of the entire region are used as a model input to predict the travel demand for the next five minutes. In order to verify the performance of the proposed method, one-month data from online car-hailing of the Chengdu Fourth Ring Road are used. The results show that the model successfully extracts the spatiotemporal features of the data, and the prediction accuracies of the proposed method are superior to those of the representative methods, including the Bayesian Ridge Model, Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression, and Long Short-Term Memory networks.