Applying Deep Learning Based Probabilistic Forecasting to Food Preparation Time for On-Demand Delivery Service

On-demand food delivery service has widely served people's daily demands worldwide, e.g., customers place over 40 million online orders in Meituan food delivery platform per day in Q3 of 2021. Predicting the food preparation time (FPT) of each order accurately is very significant for the courier and customer experience over the platform. However, there are two challenges, namely incomplete label and huge uncertainty in FPT data, to make the prediction of FPT in practice. In this paper, we apply probabilistic forecasting to FPT for the first time and propose a non-parametric method based on deep learning. Apart from the data with precise label of FPT, we make full use of the lower/upper bound of orders without precise label, during feature extraction and model construction. A number of categories of meaningful features are extracted based on the detailed data analysis to produce sharp probability distribution. For probabilistic forecasting, we propose S-QL and prove its relationship with S-CRPS for interval-censored data for the first time, which serves the quantile discretization of S-CRPS and optimization for the constructed neural network model. Extensive offline experiments over the large-scale real-world dataset, and online A/B test both demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.