A Data-Driven Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Docked Bike Prediction

Docked bike systems have been widely deployed in many cities around the world. To the service provider, predicting the demand and supply of bikes at any station is crucial to offering the best service quality. The docked bike prediction problem is highly challenging because of the complicated joint spatial-temporal (ST) dependency as bikes are picked up and dropped off, the so-called "flows", between stations. Prior works often considered the spatial and temporal dependencies separately using sequential network models, and based on locality assumptions. Without sufficiently capturing the joint spatial and temporal features, these approaches are not optimal for attaining the best prediction accuracy. We propose STGNN-DJD, a novel data-driven Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network to solve the bike demand and supply prediction problem by unifiedly embedding the Dynamic and Joint ST Dependency in two novel ST graphs. Given station locations and historical rental data on bike flow over the past time slots 0 to t - 1, we seek to predict online the bike demand and supply at any station at time t. To extract joint spatial-temporal dependency, STGNN-DJD employs a graph generator to construct, at the beginning of time t, two graphs that embed the flow relationships between stations at various time slots (flow-convoluted graph) and dynamic demand-supply pattern correlation between stations (pattern correlation graph), respectively. Given the two spatial-temporal graphs, STGNN-DJD subsequently employs a graph neural network with novel flow-based and attention-based aggregators to generate embedding of each station for docked bike prediction. We have conducted extensive experiments on two large bike-sharing datasets. Our results confirm the effectiveness of STGNN-DJD as compared with other state-of-the-art approaches, with significant improvement on RMSE and MAE (by 20%-50%). We also provide a case study on dynamic dependencies between stations and demonstrate that the locality assumption does not always hold for a docked bike system.