Multitask Weakly Supervised Learning for Origin Destination Travel Time Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multitask weakly supervised learning framework for estimating travel times using origin-destination data and road networks, addressing data privacy issues and improving route and travel time inference.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multitask learning approach that jointly infers transition probabilities, routes, and travel times from OD data, enhancing travel time estimation accuracy.

Findings

Effective route recovery demonstrated on real-world datasets.

Improved travel time estimation accuracy over baseline methods.

Robustness across different urban datasets.

Abstract

Travel time estimation from GPS trips is of great importance to order duration, ridesharing, taxi dispatching, etc. However, the dense trajectory is not always available due to the limitation of data privacy and acquisition, while the origin destination (OD) type of data, such as NYC taxi data, NYC bike data, and Capital Bikeshare data, is more accessible. To address this issue, this paper starts to estimate the OD trips travel time combined with the road network. Subsequently, a Multitask Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Travel Time Estimation (MWSL TTE) has been proposed to infer transition probability between roads segments, and the travel time on road segments and intersection simultaneously. Technically, given an OD pair, the transition probability intends to recover the most possible route. And then, the output of travel time is equal to the summation of all segments' and intersections' travel time in this route. A novel route recovery function has been proposed to iteratively maximize the current route's co occurrence probability, and minimize the discrepancy between routes' probability distribution and the inverse distribution of routes' estimation loss. Moreover, the expected log likelihood function based on a weakly supervised framework has been deployed in optimizing the travel time from road segments and intersections concurrently. We conduct experiments on a wide range of real world taxi datasets in Xi'an and Chengdu and demonstrate our method's effectiveness on route recovery and travel time estimation.