A residual spatio-temporal architecture for travel demand forecasting

Abstract This paper proposes a deep architecture called residual spatio-temporal network (RSTN) for short-term travel demand forecasting. It comprises fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) and a hybrid module consisting of an extended Conv-LSTM (CE-LSTM) that can achieve trade-off of convolutional operation and LSTM cells by tuning the hyperparameters of Conv-LSTM, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and traditional LSTM. These modules are combined via residual connections to capture the spatial, temporal and extraneous dependencies of travel demand. The end-to-end trainable RSTN redefines the traditional prediction problem as a learning residual function with regard to the travel density in each time interval. Further more, a dynamic request vector (DRV)-based data representation scheme is presented, which catches the intrinsic characteristics and variation of the trend, to improve the performance of forecasting. Simulations with two real-word data sets show that the proposed method outperforms the existing forecasting algorithms, reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) by up to 17.87%.