Evaluation of Spatial and Temporal Performance of Deep Learning Models for Travel Demand Forecasting: Application to Bike-Sharing Demand Forecasting

Deep learning approaches are widely employed for forecasting short-term travel demand to respond to real-time demand. Although it is critical for demand forecasting to be evenly distributed in the spatial and temporal views to support real-time mobility service operations, in related studies, the predictive performance of models has been evaluated only in terms of aggregated errors. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the distribution of errors to explore spatiotemporal correlations. Six deep learning models with the same architecture, except for the base module, consisting of three stacked layers, were constructed. These models were used to forecast demands for a station-based bike-sharing service in Seoul, South Korea. To attain our goals, global and local Moran’s I of the errors was introduced to evaluate the spatial and temporal performances of the deep learning approaches. The results showed that the model with convolutional long short-term memory layers, which are effective at predicting spatiotemporal data, outperformed the other models in terms of aggregated performance. However, the global Moran’s I of the errors in the model reflects spatial dependency over the regions. This suggests that the best predictive performance of the model does not necessarily imply that it performs well in demand forecasting in all regions. Furthermore, cluster and outlier analyses of the errors indicated that excessive or insufficient predictions were clustered or dispersed throughout the regions. These results can be used to enhance the model by introducing the spatial correlation index into the loss function or by incorporating additional features for handling spatial correlations.