Demand Forecasting of Online Car-Hailing With Stacking Ensemble Learning Approach and Large-Scale Datasets

With the rapid development and convenient service of online car-hailing, it has gradually become the preferred choice for people to travel. Accurate forecasting of car-hailing trip demand not only enables the drivers and companies to dispatch the vehicles and increase the mileage utilization, but also reduces the passengers' waiting-time. The rebalance of spatiotemporal demand and supply could mitigate traffic congestion, reduce traffic emission, and guide people's travel patterns. This study aimed to develop a short-term demand forecasting model for car-hailing services using stacking ensemble learning approach. The spatial-temporal characteristics of online car-hailing demand were analyzed and extracted through data analysis. The region-level spatial characteristics, time features, and weather conditions were added into the forecasting model. Then the stacking ensemble learning model was developed to predict the car-hailing demand at region-level for different time intervals, including 10 min, 15 min, and 30 min. The validation results suggested that the proposed stacking ensemble learning model has reasonable good prediction accuracy for different time intervals. The comparison results show that the short-term demand forecasting model based on stacking ensemble learning is better than single LSTM, SVR, lightGBM and Random Forest models. MAE and RMSE increased by 6.0% and 5.2% respectively at 30 min time interval, which further verifies the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model.