Predicting citywide passenger demand via reinforcement learning from spatio-temporal dynamics

The global urbanization imposes unprecedented pressure on urban infrastructure and public resources. The population explosion has made it challenging to satisfy the daily needs of urban residents. 'Smart City' is a solution that utilizes different types of data collection sensors to help manage assets and resources intelligently and more efficiently. Under the Smart City umbrella, the primary research initiative in improving the efficiency of car-hailing services is to predict the citywide passenger demand to address the imbalance between the demand and supply. However, predicting the passenger demand requires analysis on various data such as historical passenger demand, crowd outflow, and weather information, and it remains challenging to discover the latent relationships among these data. To address this challenge, we propose to improve the passenger demand prediction via learning the salient spatial-temporal dynamics within a reinforcement learning framework. Our model employs an information selection mechanism to focus on the most distinctive data in historical observations. This mechanism can automatically adjust the information zone according to the prediction performance to find the optimal choice. It also ensures the prediction model to take full advantage of the available data by introducing the positive and excluding the negative correlations. We have conducted experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset that covers 1.5 million people in a major city in China. The results show our model outperforms state-of-the-art and a series of baselines by a large margin.