An encoder framework for taxi-demand prediction using spatio-temporal function approximation

Predicting taxi demands in large cities can help in better traffic management as well as ensure better commuter satisfaction for an intelligent transportation system. However, the traffic demands across different locations have varying spatio-temporal correlations that are difficult to model. Despite the ability of the existing Deep Neural Network (DNN) models to capture the non-linearity in spatial and temporal characteristics of the demand time-series, capturing spatio-temporal characteristics in different real-world scenarios like varying historic and prediction time frame, spatio-temporal variations due to noise or missing data, etc. still remain a big challenge for the state-of-the-art models. In this paper, we introduce Encoder-ApproXimator (EnAppX), an encoder–decoder DNN-based model that uses Chebyshev function approximation in the decoding stage for taxi demand times-series prediction and can better estimate the time-series in the presence of large spatio-temporal variations. Opposed to any existing state-of-the-art model, the proposed model approximates complete spatio-temporal characteristics in the frequency domain which in turn enables the model to make a robust and improved prediction in different scenarios. Validation over two real-world taxi datasets from different cities shows a considerable improvement of around 23% in RMSE scores compared to the state-of-the-art baseline model. Unlike several existing state-of-the-art models, EnAppX also produces improved prediction accuracy across two regions for both to and fro demands.