Precise destination prediction from partial trajectories have a huge potential impact on intelligent location-based approaches. Traditional prediction approaches, which treat trajectories as one-dimensional sequences and process them in a single scale, fail to capture diverse and rich two-dimensional patterns of trajectories in different spatial scales. Meanwhile, most models treat each portion of a trajectory equally in terms of contributing to final destination prediction. This is in conflict with our observation that there exists some albeit small local areas playing much more important roles for destination prediction than the others. To address these problems, we propose a novel prediction algorithmT-CONV, which models trajectories as two-dimensional images, and then feed them into a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to extract multi-scale patterns for precise destination prediction. Furthermore, we propose a method to extract regions with different relevance for final output ofT-CONV, and further explore the local patterns of important regions by integrating multi-scope local-enhancement areas based on attention mechanism. The comprehensive experiments based on two large-scale real taxi trajectory datasets show thatT-CONVcan achieve higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the strength of the multi-scale and multi-scope feature extraction mechanisms in trajectory mining.

Massive data broadcast by GPS-equipped vehicles provide unprecedented opportunities. One of the main tasks in order to optimize our transportation networks is to build data-driven real-time decision support systems. However, the dynamic environments where the networks operate disallow the traditional assumptions required to put in practice many off-the-shelf supervised learning algorithms, such as finite training sets or stationary distributions. In this paper, we propose BRIGHT: a drift-aware supervised learning framework to predict demand quantities. BRIGHT aims to provide accurate predictions for short-term horizons through a creative ensemble of time series analysis methods that handles distinct types of concept drift. By selecting neighborhoods dynamically, BRIGHT reduces the likelihood of overfitting. By ensuring diversity among the base learners, BRIGHT ensures a high reduction of variance while keeping bias stable. Experiments were conducted using three large-scale heterogeneous real-world transportation networks in Porto (Portugal), Shanghai (China), and Stockholm (Sweden), as well as with controlled experiments using synthetic data where multiple distinct drifts were artificially induced. The obtained results illustrate the advantages of BRIGHT in relation to state-of-the-art methods for this task.

The dynamic behavior of urban mobility patterns makes matching taxi supply with demand as one of the biggest challenges in this industry. Recently, the increasing availability of massive broadcast GPS data has encouraged the exploration of this issue under different perspectives. One possible solution is to build a data-driven real-time taxi-dispatching recommender system. However, existing systems are based on strong assumptions such as stationary demand distributions and finite training sets, which make them inadequate for modeling the dynamic nature of the network. In this paper, we propose BRIGHT: a drift-aware supervised learning framework which aims to provide accurate predictions for short-term horizon taxi demand quantities through a creative ensemble of time series analysis methods that handle distinct types of concept drift. A large experimental set-up which includes three real-world transportation networks and a synthetic test-bed with artificially inserted concept drifts, was employed to illustrate the advantages of BRIGHT when compared to S.o.A methods for this problem.

Credit scoring models support loan approval decisions in the financial services industry. Lenders train these models on data from previously granted credit applications, where the borrowers' repayment behavior has been observed. This approach creates sample bias. The scoring model (i.e., classifier) is trained on accepted cases only. Applying the resulting model to screen credit applications from the population of all borrowers degrades model performance. Reject inference comprises techniques to overcome sampling bias through assigning labels to rejected cases. The paper makes two contributions. First, we propose a self-learning framework for reject inference. The framework is geared toward real-world credit scoring requirements through considering distinct training regimes for iterative labeling and model training. Second, we introduce a new measure to assess the effectiveness of reject inference strategies. Our measure leverages domain knowledge to avoid artificial labeling of rejected cases during strategy evaluation. We demonstrate this approach to offer a robust and operational assessment of reject inference strategies. Experiments on a real-world credit scoring data set confirm the superiority of the adjusted self-learning framework over regular self-learning and previous reject inference strategies. We also find strong evidence in favor of the proposed evaluation measure assessing reject inference strategies more reliably, raising the performance of the eventual credit scoring model.

The development requirements of shared buses are extremely urgent to alleviate urban traffic congestions by improving road resource utilization and to provide a neotype transportation mode with good user experiences. The key to shared bus implementation lies in accurately predicting travel requirements and planning dynamic routes. However, the sparseness and the high volatility of shared bus data bring a great resistance to accurate prediction of travel requirements. Based on the consideration of user experiences, optimization objectives of shared bus route planning are significantly different from traditional public transportation and shared bus route planning is far more challenging than online car-hailing services due to the relatively high number of passengers. In this paper, we put forward a two-stage approach (SubBus), which is composed of travel requirement prediction and dynamic routes planning, based on various crowdsourced shared bus data to generate dynamic routes for shared buses in the “last mile” scene. First, we analyze the resident travel behaviors to obtain five predictive features, such as flow, time, week, location, and bus, and utilize them to predict travel requirements accurately based on a machine learning model. Second, we design a dynamic programming algorithm to generate dynamic, optimal routes with fixed destinations for multiple operating buses utilizing prediction results based on operating characteristics of shared buses. Extensive experiments are performed on real crowdsourced shared subway shuttle bus data and demonstrate that SubBus outperforms other methods on dynamic route planning for the “last mile” scene.Note to Practitioners—This paper is inspired by the problem of shared subway shuttle bus dynamic route planning for the “last mile” scene, and it is also applicable to other scenes, including commuting scenes, urban transportation hub scenes, and destination scenes of the tourist market. Shared bus operation routes at such scenes are usually aimed at trips with fixed destinations. Existing approaches to planning routes are generally designed for traditional transportation, such as traditional buses and taxis. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage dynamic route planning approach (SubBus) based on the operation characteristics of shared subway shuttle buses. We perform a resident travel behavior analysis to improve the accuracy of travel requirement prediction. After that, we combine the prediction results and station properties to gain shared bus optimal routes. We then display how to apply SubBus to optimize shared bus operation status based on crowdsourced shared subway shuttle bus data generated by Panda Bus Company. We keep a continuous collaboration with the company to optimize the approach details and experimental effects, which demonstrate that our approach can generate effective routes for shared subway shuttle buses to optimize operation status on the “last mile” issue.

Today, we live in an era where pervasive sensor networks both collect and broadcast rich digital footprints about the human mobility. However, most of this data often comes in an incomplete and/or inaccurate fashion. In this paper, we propose a knowledge discovery framework to handle such issues in the context of automatic incident detection systems fed with traffic flow data. This framework operates in three steps: 1) it clusters sensors with a novel multi-criteria distance metric tailored for this purpose, followed by a heuristic rule that labels the abnormal groups; 2) then, a spatial cross-correlation framework identifies seasonal and individual abnormal readings to perform a more fine-grained filtering; and 3) finally, we propose a novel fundamental diagram that discovers the critical density of a given road section/spot on a data-driven fashion that is resistant to both outliers and noise within the input data. Large-scale experiments were conducted over traffic flow data provided by a major Asian highway operator. The obtained results illustrate well the contributions of this framework: it drastically reduces the noise within the raw data, and it also allows determining reliable definitions of traffic states (congestion/no congestion) on a completely automated way.

Floating car data (FCD) denotes the type of data (location, speed, and destination) produced and broadcasted periodically by running vehicles. Increasingly, intelligent transportation systems take advantage of such data for prediction purposes as input to road and transit control and to discover useful mobility patterns with applications to transport service design and planning, to name just a few applications. However, there are considerable quality issues that affect the usefulness and efficacy of FCD in these many applications. In this paper, we propose a methodology to compute such quality indicators automatically for large FCD sets. It leverages on a set of statistical indicators (named Yuki-san) covering multiple dimensions of FCD such as spatio-temporal coverage, accuracy, and reliability. As such, the Yuki-san indicators provide a quick and intuitive means to assess the potential “value” and “veracity” characteristics of the data. Experimental results with two mobility-related data mining and supervised learning tasks on the basis of two real-world FCD sources show that the Yuki-san indicators are indeed consistent with how well the applications perform using the data. With a wider variety of FCD (e.g., from navigation systems and CAN buses) becoming available, further research and validation into the dimensions covered and the efficacy of the Yuki-San indicators is needed.

The recent technological advances on telecommunications create a new reality on mobility sensing. Nowadays, we live in an era where ubiquitous digital devices are able to broadcast rich information about human mobility in real-time and at a high rate. Such fact exponentially increased the availability of large-scale mobility data which has been popularized in the media as the new currency, fueling the future vision of our smart cities that will transform our lives. The reality is that we just began to recognize significant research challenges across a spectrum of topics. Consequently, there is an increasing interest among different research communities (ranging from civil engineering to computer science) and industrial stakeholders on building knowledge discovery pipelines over such data sources. However, such availability also raises privacy issues that must be considered by both industrial and academic stakeholders on using these resources.

Recently, cutting edge technologies to facilitate data collection have emerged on a large scale. One of the most prominent is the in-vehicle data recorder (IVDR). There are multiple ways to assign the IVDR's data to the different drivers who share the same vehicle. Irrespective of the level of sophistication, all of these technologies still suffer considerable limitations in their accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology, which can identify the driver of a given trip using historical trip-based data. To do so, an advanced machine learning pipeline is proposed. The main goal is to take advantage of highly available data - such as driver-labeled floating car data collected by a IVDR - to build a pattern-based algorithm able to identify the trip's driver category when its true identity is unknown. This stepwise process includes feature generation/selection, multiple heterogeneous explanatory models, and an ensemble approach (i.e., stacked generalization) to reduce their generalization error. Our goal is to provide an inexpensive alternative to existing driver identification technologies, which can serve as their complement and/or validation purposes. Experiments conducted over a real-world case study from Israel uncover the potential of this idea: it obtained an accuracy of 88% and Cohen's Kappa agreement score of 74%.

This paper presents the proof-of-concept evaluation of a Resource Aware VNF Agnostic (RAVA) NFV orchestration method that is designed to enhance the Quality of Decision (QoD) of a cloud controller by optimizing the life cycle management decisions that it takes in order to manage the resources in a cloud infrastructure (e.g., a data center). The RAVA method proposes a novel concept of deriving the affinity scores for the plurality of resource units with reference to a specific resource unit for each individual Virtual Machine (VM) instance hosting a Virtualized Network Function (VNF). This affinity score, referred to as Reference Resource Affinity Score (RRAS), will enable the cloud controller to perform precise and efficient resource tailoring or dimensioning; and hence will optimize its decisions and actions related to the management and orchestration of the virtualized resources inside the cloud infrastructure. The motivation behind proposing RAVA is to enhance the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Management and Orchestration (MANO) system capabilities towards the realization of a Carrier Cloud, an important vision for the future 5G architecture. The evaluation results presented in this paper are based on an OpenStack based proof-of-concept implementation of the RAVA method.

Intelligent transportation systems based on automated data collection frameworks are widely used by the major transit companies around the globe. This paper describes the current state of the art on improving both planning and control on public road transportation companies using automatic vehicle location (AVL) data. By surveying this topic, the expectation is to help develop a better understanding of the nature, approaches, challenges, and opportunities with regard to these problems. This paper starts by presenting a brief review on improving the network definition based on historical location-based data. Second, it presents a comprehensive review on AVL-based evaluation techniques of the schedule plan (SP) reliability, discussing the existing metrics. Then, the different dimensions on improving the SP reliability are presented in detail, as well as the works addressing such problem. Finally, the automatic control strategies are also revised, along with the research employed over the location-based data. A comprehensive discussion on the techniques employed is provided to encourage those who are starting research on this topic. It is important to highlight that there are still gaps in AVL-based literature, such as the following: 1) long-term travel time prediction; 2) finding optimal slack time; or 3) choosing the best control strategy to apply in each situation in the event of schedule instability. Hence, this paper includes introductory model formulations, reference surveys, formal definitions, and an overview of a promising area, which is of interest to any researcher, regardless of the level of expertise.

Informed driving is increasingly becoming a key feature for increasing the sustainability of taxi companies. The sensors that are installed in each vehicle are providing new opportunities for automatically discovering knowledge, which, in return, delivers information for real-time decision making. Intelligent transportation systems for taxi dispatching and for finding time-saving routes are already exploring these sensing data. This paper introduces a novel methodology for predicting the spatial distribution of taxi-passengers for a short-term time horizon using streaming data. First, the information was aggregated into a histogram time series. Then, three time-series forecasting techniques were combined to originate a prediction. Experimental tests were conducted using the online data that are transmitted by 441 vehicles of a fleet running in the city of Porto, Portugal. The results demonstrated that the proposed framework can provide effective insight into the spatiotemporal distribution of taxi-passenger demand for a 30-min horizon.