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Conventionally, the 2-parameter Weibull model, Arrhenius-Weibull model, has been used vastly for transformer aging-dependent unavailability modeling. However, this model only uses the lifetime feature to describe the transformer's degradation process and to calibrate the Weibull parameters, which harms the accuracy of aging-dependent unavailability forecasting. In response, this paper develops a 3-calibratable-parameter Weibull model for evaluating the transformer aging-dependent unavailability. In the proposed model, both the individualized aging threshold and lifetime are taken into the calibration of the Weibull parameters to accurately characterize the heterogeneity in transformer populations. First, a degree of polymerization (DP) analysis and Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) based approach is proposed for estimating the transformers’ uncertain aging thresholds and lifetimes. Then, the Maximum Likelihood Estimate and Particle Swarm Optimization are jointly adopted to model the relationship among the calibratable Weibull parameters, aging threshold, and lifetime. Finally, the analytical formula of aging-dependent unavailability is derived from the established 3-calibratable-parameter Weibull model using an integral-discretization method. A real utility application example in China's Chongqing power system has been presented to validate and demonstrate the practicality and usefulness of this method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of online contents in social media frequently experiences ebb and flow, and thus its evolution often involves different stages, such as burst and valley. Exploring the patterns of popularity evolution, especially how burst forms and decays, and even further, predicting the trends of popularity evolution is both an important research topic and beneficial to support decision making for many applications, such as emergency management, business intelligence, and public security. Previous work on popularity prediction has focused on predicting the popularity volume of online contents, and at most, popularity burst and ignored the exploration of popularity evolution and the prediction of its stages. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose our method for the popularity stage prediction problem both at the microscopic level and macroscopic level. At the microscopic level, we first extract multiple dynamic factors and infer future evolution stage by considering the contributions of different dynamic factors. At the macroscopic level, we extract the overall evolution patterns of popularity stages and adopt a pattern matching-based method to predict future popularity stages. We evaluate the proposed approach using tweets in SinaWeibo, the most popular Twitter-like social media platform in China. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in predicting popularity evolution stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate and reliable low-voltage load forecasting is critical to optimal operation and control of distribution network and smart grid. However, compared to traditional regional load forecasting at high-voltage level, it faces tough challenges due to the inherent high uncertainty of the low-capacity load and distributed renewable energy integrated in the demand side. This paper proposes a novel hybrid ensemble deep learning (HEDL) approach for deterministic and probabilistic low-voltage load forecasting. The deep belief network (DBN) is applied to low-voltage load point prediction with the strong ability of approximating nonlinear mapping. A series of ensemble learning methods including bagging and boosting variants are introduced to improve the regression ability of DBN. In addition, the differencing transformation technique is utilized to ensure the stationarity of load time series for the application bagging and boosting methods. On the basis of the integrated thought of ensemble learning, a new hybrid ensemble algorithm is developed via integrating multiple separate ensemble methods. Considering the diversity in various ensemble algorithms, an effective K nearest neighbor classification method is utilized to adaptively determine the weights of sub-models. Furthermore, HEDL based probabilistic forecasting is proposed by taking advantage of the inherent resample idea in bagging and boosting. The effectiveness of the HEDL method for both deterministic and probabilistic forecasting has been systematically verified based on realistic load data from East China and Australia, indicating its promising prospective for practical applications in distribution networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand-side management (DSM) increases the complexity of forecasting environment, which makes traditional forecasting methods difficult to meet the firm's need for predictive accuracy. Since deep learning can comprehensively consider various factors to improve prediction results, this paper improves the deep belief network from three aspects of input data, model and performance, and uses it to solve the short-term load forecasting problem in DSM. In the data optimization stage, the Hankel matrix is constructed to increase the input weight of DSM data, and the gray relational analysis is used to select strongly correlated data from the data set. In the model optimization stage, the Gauss-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machine is used as the first restricted Boltzmann machine of the deep network to convert the continuity feature of input data into binomial distribution feature. In the performance optimization stage, a pre-training method combining error constraint and unsupervised learning is proposed to provide good initial parameters, and the global fine-tuning of network parameters is realized based on the genetic algorithm. Based on the actual data of Tianjin Power Grid in China, the experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The insulation paper loss of life (LOL) of a distribution transformer (DT) is largely determined by its winding hot-spot temperature. It is mainly estimated via the transformer load, ambient temperature, and related physical parameters. Fortunately, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) can provide load profiles of DTs, allowing a cost-effective LOL estimation solution. However, the AMI dataset contains measurement errors that significantly reduce LOL estimation accuracy. A forecasting method is needed to recover the erroneous AMI data. This is a challenging problem, as the load profiles of DTs are nonstationary and volatile. We propose an ensemble of stacked long short-term memory (ES-LSTM) networks to simultaneously capture load consumption patterns of DTs and their correlations. The ES-LSTM consists of two independent LSTM networks and a feed-forward neural network (FFNN) stacked on top of them. A two-stage training procedure is applied. In the first stage, two LSTM networks are trained to capture the daily or weekly load patterns. In the second stage, the FFNN is trained to optimally combine the last hidden outputs of the two LSTM networks. Field verification is conducted using real AMI data obtained from an urban distribution utility in China. The test results confirmed the superiority of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of China high-speed railway, the low frequency oscillation (LFO) of electrical quantities appears more often recently and leads to some severe problems of train operation. To improve the traction line-side converter control and suppress the phenomenon economically and effectively, a model-based predictive direct power control (MPDPC) approach is proposed in this paper. The approach adopts a discrete-time model of traction line-side converter in d–q reference frame to predict the future values of the input active and reactive power. The optimal switching state is selected by minimizing a cost function of power to evaluate the power errors at the next sampling time. Through the theoretical analysis and simulations, the performance of MPDPC is compared with traditional transient direct current control (TDCC) that is widely adopted in China Railway High-Speed 3 electric-multiple-unit. The real-time online simulations based on Real-Time Laboratory (RT-LAB) are also realized to further validate the results. Moreover, two vehicle-grid cascade simulation systems are constructed, and the LFO suppressing capability of MPDPC and TDCC is compared. Finally, the steady-state characteristic, dynamic characteristic, and LFO suppressing capability of MPDPC are demonstrated through the analysis of key performance indexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stationless bike-sharing systems such as Mobike are currently becoming extremely popular in China as well as some other big cities in the world. Compared to traditional bicycle-sharing systems, stationless bike-sharing systems do not need bike stations. Users can rent and return bikes at arbitrary locations through an App installed on their smart phones. Such a convenient and flexible bike-sharing mode greatly solves the last mile issue of the commuters, and better meets their real bike usage demand. However, it also poses new challenges for operators to manage the system. The first primary challenge is how to accurately estimate the real bike usage demand in different areas of a city and in different time intervals, which is crucial for the system planning and operation. This paper for the first time proposes a data driven approach for bike usage demand inference in stationless bike-sharing systems. The idea is that we first estimate the demands in some regions and time intervals from a small number of observed bike check-out/in data directly, and then use them as seeds to infer the region-level bike usage demands of an entire city. Specifically, we formulate this problem as a matrix completion task by modeling the bike usage demand as a matrix whose two dimensions are time intervals of a day and regions of a city, respectively. With the observation that POI distribution of a region is an important indicator to bike demand, we propose to utilize inductive matrix factorization by considering POIs as side information. As the bike usage data are highly correlated in both spatial and temporal dimensions, we also incorporate the spatial-temporal correlations as well as the balanced bike usage constraint into a joint optimization framework. We evaluate the proposed model on a large Mobike trip dataset collected from Beijing, and the experimental results show its superior performance by comparison with various baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate forecast of citywide crowd flows on flexible region partition benefits urban planning, traffic management, and public safety. Previous research either fails to capture the complex spatiotemporal dependencies of crowd flows or is restricted on grid region partition that loses semantic context. In this paper, we propose DeepFlowFlex, a graph-based model to jointly predict inflows and outflows for each region of arbitrary shape and size in a city. Analysis on cellular datasets covering 2.4 million users in China reveals dependencies and distinctive patterns of crowd flows in not only the conventional space and time domains, but also the speed domain, due to the diverse transportation modes in the mobility data. DeepFlowFlex explicitly groups crowd flows with respect to speed and time, and combines graph convolutional long short-term memory networks and graph convolutional neural networks to extract complex spatiotemporal dependencies, especially long-term and long-distance inter-region dependencies. Evaluations on two big cellular datasets and public GPS trace datasets show that DeepFlowFlex outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning and big-data-based methods on both grid and non-grid city map partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and predicting cellular traffic at large-scale and fine-granularity is beneficial and valuable to mobile users, wireless carriers, and city authorities. Predicting cellular traffic in modern metropolis is particularly challenging because of the tremendous temporal and spatial dynamics introduced by diverse user Internet behaviors and frequent user mobility citywide. In this paper, we characterize and investigate the root causes of such dynamics in cellular traffic through a big cellular usage dataset covering 1.5 million users and 5,929 cell towers in a major city of China. We reveal intensive spatio-temporal dependency even among distant cell towers, which is largely overlooked in previous works. To explicitly characterize and effectively model the spatio-temporal dependency of urban cellular traffic, we propose a novel decomposition of in-cell and inter-cell data traffic, and apply a graph-based deep learning approach to accurate cellular traffic prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art time-series based approaches and we also show through an example study how the decomposition of cellular traffic can be used for event inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, bike-sharing systems have been widely deployed in many big cities, which provide an economical and healthy lifestyle. With the prevalence of bike-sharing systems, a lot of companies join the bike-sharing market, leading to increasingly fierce competition. To be competitive, bike-sharing companies and app developers need to make strategic decisions and predict the popularity of bike-sharing apps. However, existing works mostly focus on predicting the popularity of a single app, the popularity contest among different apps has not been explored yet. In this paper, we aim to forecast the popularity contest between Mobike and Ofo, two most popular bike-sharing apps in China. We develop CompetitiveBike, a system to predict the popularity contest among bike-sharing apps leveraging multi-source data. We extract two novel types of features: coarse-grained and fine-grained competitive features, and utilize Random Forest model to forecast the future competitiveness. In addition, we view mobile apps competition as a long-term event and generate the event storyline to enrich our competitive analysis. We collect data about two bike-sharing apps and two food ordering & delivery apps from 11 app stores and Sina Weibo, implement extensive experimental studies, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its brief form and growing popularity, microblogging is becoming people’s favorite choice for seeking information and expressing opinions. Messages received by a user mainly depend on whom the user follows. Thus, recommending users with similar interests may improve the experience quality for information receiving. Since messages posted by microblogging users reflect their interests, and the keywords in the messages indicate their main focus to a large extent, we can discover users’ preferences by analyzing the user-generated contents. Moreover, users’ interests are not static, on the contrary, they change as time goes by. Based on such intuitions, in this paper, we propose a temporal-topic model to analyze users’ possible behaviors and predict their potential friends in microblogging. The model learns users’ latent preferences by extracting keywords on aggregated messages over a period of time via a topic model, and then the impact of time is considered to deal with interest drifts. The experimental results of friend recommendations on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging sites in China, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate forecast of citywide passenger demand helps online car-hailing service providers to better schedule driver supplies. Previous research either uses only passenger order history and fails to capture the deep dependency of passenger demand, or is restricted on grid region partition that loses physical context. Recent advance in mobile traffic analysis has fostered understanding of city functions. In this article, we propose FlowFlexDP, a demand prediction model that integrates regional crowd flow and applies to flexible region partition. Analysis on a cellular dataset covering 1.5 million users in a major city in China reveals strong correlation between passenger demand and crowd flow. FlowFlexDP extracts both order history and crowd flow from cellular data, and adopts Graph Convolutional Neural Network to adapt prediction for regions of arbitrary shapes and sizes in a city. Evaluation on a large scale data set of 6 online car-hailing applications from cellular data shows that FlowFlexDP accurately predicts passenger demand and outperforms the state-of-the-art demand prediction methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term electricity consumption forecasting has been a hot issue due to its importance in power systems planning. Recently, system dynamics (SD) have been considered a potential method for electricity consumption forecasting. However, traditional SD methods are failed in forecasting future power systems toward low-carbon, due to the complex influencing factors and the simple SD model structure. In this study, a novel method combining SD and the ImPACT equation is proposed to solve the above problem. First, a new influencing factor system including emerging factors is established to consider the development of future power system. Subsequently, the ImPACT equation is employed to decompose the electricity consumption into four subsystems. By doing this, the linkage between factors and electricity consumption can be better revealed, which helps to improve the forecasting accuracy. Next, models for quantifying the correlation between subsystems and factors are established using SD. Finally, the proposed method is verified by forecasting the power consumption of China in the future year 2030 to 2050. Furthermore, various scenarios are set to analyze the changing trend of future power consumption by different influencing factors. The results of this article can provide important basic information for power supply and power grid planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is the largest coal consumer in the world. The massive exploitation and utilization of coal resources have resulted in serious problems of heavy metal pollution and environmental contamination, such as soil degradation, water pollution, crop damage, and even threatening human lives. Therefore, monitoring soil heavy metal pollution quickly and in real time is an urgent task at present. This research not only formulated a new preprocessing method enlightened by few-shot learning for soil hyperspectral data but also combined it with other soil-related auxiliary information to extract effective information from the soil hyperspectrum, at the end of which different regression methods were adopted to predict soil heavy metal contamination. This test used 168 actual soil samples from the Eastern Junggar coalfield in Xinjiang for verification. Since copper in the soil is a trace element and the corresponding spectral characteristics are affected by other impurities, improper use of hyperspectral preprocessing methods may introduce interference information or may delete useful information, which makes the model effect unsatisfied. To effectively address the above-mentioned problems, the preprocessing method of this experiment combined the second-order differential derivation, and the data enhancement (DA) method together with the addition of auxiliary information to allow more effective features to be entered into the model. Next, the attentive interpretable tabular learning (TabNet) model was improved in three different ways using the original TabNet model and three improved TabNet models to create regression models. One of the improved TabNet models had the best effect, with a list of the top 30 features according to the degree of importance. Meanwhile, the regression prediction of Cu content using four different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) revealed that the model with the residual block was the strongest and slightly outperformed the improved TabNet model, but lacked interpretation of the input data. Besides, this experiment also employed different preprocessing methods for regression prediction on various models and found that the traditional preprocessing methods performed best in traditional regression models [e.g., partial least square regression (PLSR)] and underperformed in deep learning models. The selected optimal model was compared with PLSR and CNN models. The results indicated that both the improved TabNet model and the improved CNN model had better performance using the new preprocessing approach proposed in this article, with improved TabNet yielding a coefficient of determination ($\text{R}^{2}$), root-mean-square error (RMSE), and the ratio of performance to interquartile range (RPIQ) of 0.94, 1.341, and 4.474, respectively. The improved CNN model had a coefficient of determination of 0.942, an RMSE of 1.324, and an interquartile range of 4.531 in the test dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are rapidly becoming an indispensable part of our life with their increasing deployment in many promising areas, including tele-health, smart city, intelligent agriculture. Understanding the mobility of IoT devices is essential to improve quality of service in IoT applications, such as route planning in logistic management, infrastructure deployment, cellular network update and congestion detection in intelligent traffic. Despite its importance, there are not many results pertaining to the mobility of IoT devices. In this article, we aim to answer three research questions: (i) what are the mobility patterns of IoT device? (ii) what are the differences between IoT device and smartphone mobility patterns? (iii) how the IoT device mobility patterns differ among device types and usage scenarios? We present a comprehensive characterization of IoT device mobility patterns from the perspective of cellular data networks, using a 36-days long signal trace, including 1.5 million IoT devices and 0.425 million smartphones, collected from a nation-wide cellular network in China. We first investigate the basic patterns of IoT devices from two perspectives: temporal and spatial characteristics. Our study finds that IoT device mobility exhibits significantly different patterns compared with smartphones in multiple aspects. For instance, IoT devices move more frequently and have larger radius of gyration. Then we explore the essential mobility of IoT devices by utilizing two models that reveal the nature of human mobility, i.e., exploration and preferential return (EPR) model and entropy based predictability model. We find that IoT devices, with few exceptions, behave totally different from human, and we further derive a new formulation to describe their movement. We also find the gap mobility predictability and predictability limit between IoT and human is not as big as people expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a new energy vehicle, fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) have the advantages of pollution-free and zero-emission, which have attracted wide attention from all over the world. By predicting the ownership of FCVs, decision-makers can grasp the future development potential of FCVs, so that the national government can adopt corresponding policies and measures. To this end, based on analyzing the development trend of FCVs, this article proposes an FCVs ownership prediction method based on the generalized Bass model. From the perspective of technology, application, and market conditions of FCVs, this article first analyzes the development trend of FCVs in the future, which provides the basis for the establishment of the ownership prediction method and the estimation of model parameters. Then, considering the influence of levelized cost of driving (LCD) reduction and hydrogen refueling stations (HRSs) constructions, a prediction method of FCVs ownership based on the generalized Bass model is proposed, and the model parameters are estimated by Grey Verhulst model, electric vehicles data, and liquefied natural gas vehicles data. Through the proposed method, the ownership of FCVs in China from 2021 to 2070 is predicted and the results show that the ownership of FCVs in China will reach about 1.43 million in 2030 and about 10.41 million in 2040. Finally, through sensitivity analysis, this article discusses the influence of external factors such as policy, LCD, and HRSs on the market diffusion of FCVs, and puts forward corresponding suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data-driven control without using mathematical models is a promising research direction for urban traffic control due to the massive amounts of traffic data generated every day. This article proposes a novel distributed model-free adaptive predictive control (D-MFAPC) approach for multiregion urban traffic networks. More specifically, the traffic dynamics of the network regions are first transformed into MFAPC data models, and then, the derived MFAPC data models instead of mathematical traffic models serve as the prediction models in the distributed control design. The formulated control problem is finally solved with an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based approach. The simulation results for the traffic network of Linfen, Shanxi, China, show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]