A hybrid integrated deep learning model for the prediction of citywide spatio-temporal flow volumes

The spatio-temporal residual network (ST-ResNet) leverages the power of deep learning (DL) for predicting the volume of citywide spatio-temporal flows. However, this model, neglects the dynamic dependency of the input flows in the temporal dimension, which affects what spatio-temporal features may be captured in the result. This study introduces a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network into the ST-ResNet to form a hybrid integrated-DL model to predict the volumes of citywide spatio-temporal flows (called HIDLST). The new model can dynamically learn the temporal dependency among flows via the feedback connection in the LSTM to improve accurate captures of spatio-temporal features in the flows. We test the HIDLST model by predicting the volumes of citywide taxi flows in Beijing, China. We tune the hyperparameters of the HIDLST model to optimize the prediction accuracy. A comparative study shows that the proposed model consistently outperforms ST-ResNet and several other typical DL-based models on prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we discuss the distribution of prediction errors and the contributions of the different spatio-temporal patterns.