MS-ResCnet: A combined spatiotemporal modeling and multi-scale fusion network for taxi demand prediction

As an important part of urban intelligent transportation system, predicting users' demand for taxi using offline GPS data has attracted interests in recent years. In general, the distribution of traffic flow in different areas of the urban is different. Furthermore, the characteristics of traffic flow in different location areas present different. Therefore, it is challenging to achieve accurate pre-diction of users' demand for taxi in different spatiotemporal scenes. This paper presents a com-bined multi-scale residual calibration network (MS-ResCnet) using residual calibration network and multi-scale fusion mechanism to predict users' demand for taxi. Specifically, mapping ras-terization and time series division methods are used to convert vehicular GPS data into spatio-temporal images of traffic flow within continuous sub grid areas. Then, the proximity, periodicity, and tendency, as significant characteristics of spatiotemporal images of traffic flow in each sub grid area are extracted. Thus, we establish a multi-dimensional spatiotemporal characteristic perception scheme of traffic flow in each grid area. Moreover, the datum characteristics and calibration characteristics of spatiotemporal images are extracted through the dual channel ResCnet network. Through the deep stagger training network, the full fusion of multi-scale spatiotemporal characteristics is realized. The performance of MS-ResCnet model is evaluated and verified using public datasets. The simulation results show that the traffic flow prediction performance of MS-ResCnet model is better than that of traditional STAR model. The root mean square error (RMSE) of the proposed method outperform the STAR model around 2.57%.