  Short-term passenger demand forecasting is of great importance to the
on-demand ride service platform, which can incentivize vacant cars moving from
over-supply regions to over-demand regions. The spatial dependences, temporal
dependences, and exogenous dependences need to be considered simultaneously,
however, which makes short-term passenger demand forecasting challenging. We
propose a novel deep learning (DL) approach, named the fusion convolutional
long short-term memory network (FCL-Net), to address these three dependences
within one end-to-end learning architecture. The model is stacked and fused by
multiple convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) layers, standard LSTM
layers, and convolutional layers. The fusion of convolutional techniques and
the LSTM network enables the proposed DL approach to better capture the
spatio-temporal characteristics and correlations of explanatory variables. A
tailored spatially aggregated random forest is employed to rank the importance
of the explanatory variables. The ranking is then used for feature selection.
The proposed DL approach is applied to the short-term forecasting of passenger
demand under an on-demand ride service platform in Hangzhou, China.
Experimental results, validated on real-world data provided by DiDi Chuxing,
show that the FCL-Net achieves better predictive performance than traditional
approaches including both classical time-series prediction models and neural
network based algorithms (e.g., artificial neural network and LSTM). This paper
is one of the first DL studies to forecast the short-term passenger demand of
an on-demand ride service platform by examining the spatio-temporal
correlations.
