Transfer learning for cross-modal demand prediction of bike-share and public transit

Abstract

The urban transportation system is a combination of multiple transport modes, and the interdependencies across those modes exist. This means that the travel demand across different travel modes could be correlated as one mode may receive/create demand from/for another mode, not to mention natural correlations between different demand time series due to general demand flow patterns across the network. It is expected that cross-modal ripple effects will become more prevalent with Mobility as a Service. Therefore, by propagating demand data across modes, a better demand prediction could be obtained. To this end, this study explores various transfer learning strategies and machine learning models for cross-modal demand prediction. The trip data of bike-share, metro, and taxi are processed as the station-level passenger flows, and then the proposed prediction method is tested in the large-scale case studies of Nanjing and Chicago. The results suggest that prediction models with transfer learning perform better than unimodal prediction models. Fine-tuning without freezing strategy performs the best among all transfer learning strategies, and the split-brain strategy can handle the data missing problem. Furthermore, the 3-layer stacked Long Short-Term Memory model performs particularly well in cross-modal demand prediction. These results verify our deep transfer learning method’s forecasting improvement over existing benchmarks and demonstrate the good transferability for cross-modal demand prediction in multiple cities.