Predicting Spatiotemporal Demand of Dockless E-Scooter Sharing Services with a Masked Fully Convolutional Network

Dockless electric scooters (e-scooter) have emerged as a green alternative to automobiles and a solution to the first- and last-mile problems. Demand anticipation, or being able to accurately predict spatiotemporal demand of e-scooter usage, is one supply–demand balancing strategy. In this paper, we...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Santi Phithakkitnukooon, Karn Patanukhom, Merkebe Getachew Demissie
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: MDPI AG 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/25383b616feb4c89bd22128ffb8532f0
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Dockless electric scooters (e-scooter) have emerged as a green alternative to automobiles and a solution to the first- and last-mile problems. Demand anticipation, or being able to accurately predict spatiotemporal demand of e-scooter usage, is one supply–demand balancing strategy. In this paper, we present a dockless e-scooter demand prediction model based on a fully convolutional network (FCN) coupled with a masking process and a weighted loss function, namely, masked FCN (or MFCN). The MFCN model handles the sparse e-scooter usage data with its masking process and weighted loss function. The model is trained with highly correlated features through our feature selection process. Next-hour and next 24-h prediction schemes have been tested for both pick-up and drop-off demands. Overall, the proposed MFCN outperforms other baseline models including a naïve forecasting, linear regression, and convolutional long short-term memory networks with mean absolute errors of 0.0434 and 0.0464 for the next-hour pick-up and drop-off demand prediction, respectively, and the errors of 0.0491 and 0.0501 for the next 24-h pick-up and drop-off demand prediction, respectively. The developed MFCN expands the collection of deep learning techniques that can be applied in the transportation domain, especially spatiotemporal demand prediction.