ALCNN: Attention-based Model for Fine-grained Demand Inference of Dock-less Shared Bike in New Cities

TL;DR

This paper introduces ALCNN, an attention-based local CNN model that predicts fine-grained bike demand in new cities by leveraging geographic data, distribution adaptation, and daily pattern mining, improving demand inference accuracy.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel ALCNN model that combines attention mechanisms, multi-source geographic features, and distribution adaptation for demand inference in new cities.

Findings

ALCNN outperforms existing methods in demand prediction accuracy.

The model effectively captures daily demand patterns and regional influences.

Distribution adaptation improves model performance in new city scenarios.

Abstract

In recent years, dock-less shared bikes have been widely spread across many cities in China and facilitate people's lives. However, at the same time, it also raises many problems about dock-less shared bike management due to the mismatching between demands and real distribution of bikes. Before deploying dock-less shared bikes in a city, companies need to make a plan for dispatching bikes from places having excessive bikes to locations with high demands for providing better services. In this paper, we study the problem of inferring fine-grained bike demands anywhere in a new city before the deployment of bikes. This problem is challenging because new city lacks training data and bike demands vary by both places and time. To solve the problem, we provide various methods to extract discriminative features from multi-source geographic data, such as POI, road networks and nighttime light, for each place. We utilize correlation Principle Component Analysis (coPCA) to deal with extracted features of both old city and new city to realize distribution adaption. Then, we adopt a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based model to mine daily patterns for each place from fine-grained bike demand. We propose an attention based local CNN model, \textbf{ALCNN}, to infer the daily patterns with latent features from coPCA with multiple CNNs for modeling the influence of neighbor places. In addition, ALCNN merges latent features from multiple CNNs and can select a suitable size of influenced regions. The extensive experiments on real-life datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms competitive methods.