Prediction of urban human mobility using large-scale taxi traces and its applications

Abstract

This paper investigates human mobility patterns in an urban taxi transportation system. This work focuses on predicting humanmobility fromdiscovering patterns of in the number of passenger pick-ups quantity (PUQ) from urban hotspots. This paper proposes an improved ARIMA based prediction method to forecast the spatial-temporal variation of passengers in a hotspot. Evaluation with a large-scale realworld data set of 4 000 taxis’ GPS traces over one year shows a prediction error of only 5.8%. We also explore the application of the prediction approach to help drivers find their next passengers. The simulation results using historical real-world data demonstrate that, with our guidance, drivers can reduce the time taken and distance travelled, to find their next passenger, by 37.1% and 6.4%, respectively.

Keywords

urban traffic / GPS traces / hotspots / human mobility prediction / auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg