Towards Dynamic Urban Bike Usage Prediction for Station Network Reconfiguration

Abstract

Bike sharing has become one of the major choices of transportation for residents in metropolitan cities worldwide. A station-based bike sharing system is usually operated in the way that a user picks up a bike from one station, and drops it off at another. Bike stations are, however, not static, as the bike stations are often reconfigured to accommodate changing demands or city urbanization over time. One of the key operations is to evaluate candidate locations and install new stations to expand the bike sharing station network. Conventional practices have been studied to predict existing station usage, while evaluating new stations is highly challenging due to the lack of the historical bike usage. To fill this gap, in this work we propose a novel and efficient bike station-level prediction algorithm called AtCoR, which can predict the bike usage at both existing and new stations (candidate locations during reconfiguration). In order to address the lack of historical data issues, virtual historical usage of new stations is generated according to their correlations with the surrounding existing stations, for AtCoR model initialization. We have designed novel station-centered heatmaps which characterize for each target station centered at the heatmap the trend that riders travel between it and the station's neighboring regions, enabling the model to capture the learnable features of the bike station network. The captured features are further applied to the prediction of bike usage for new stations. Our extensive experiment study on more than 23 million trips from three major bike sharing systems in US, including New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, shows that AtCoR outperforms baselines and state-of-art models in prediction of both existing and future stations.