Latent Semantic Sequence Coding Applied to Taxi Travel Time Estimation

Taxi travel time estimation based on real-time traffic flow collection in IoT has been well explored; however, it becomes a challenge to use the limited taxi data to estimate the travel time. Most of the existing methods in this scenario rely on shallow feature engineering. Nevertheless, they have limited performance in learning complex moving patterns. Thus, a Latent Semantic Pulse Sequence-based Deep Neural Network (LSPS-DNN) is proposed in this paper to improve the taxi travel time estimation performance by constructing a latent semantic propagation graph representing the latent path sequence. It first extracts the shallow modal features of trips, such as the time period and spatial location at different granularities. The representation of the pulse propagation graph is then extracted from shallow spatial features using a Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN). Further, the propagation graph is encoded with negative sampling to obtain the embedding of deep propagation features between ODs. Meanwhile, we conduct deep network learning based on the Chengdu and NYC taxi datasets; our experimental evaluation results show it has a better performance compared to traditional feature construction methods.