TaxiInt: Predicting the Taxi Flow at Urban Traffic Hotspots Using Graph Convolutional Networks and the Trajectory Data

Taxi flow is an important part of the urban intelligent transportation system. The accurate prediction of taxi flow provides an attractive way to find the potential traffic hotspots in the city, which helps to avoid serious traffic congestions by taking effective measures in advance. The current prediction of taxi flow and its impact on urban transportation are closely related to the passenger origin-destination (OD) information. However, high-quality OD information is not always available. To address this problem, a prediction model, named as TaxiInt, is proposed in this study. Different from other density-clustering-based approaches, neural network, or OD information based models, TaxiInt predicted the taxi flow using the trajectory data of taxis. The spatial features and temporal features of each road were extracted using a graph convolutional network, which was trained with the road network information and the trajectory data. The experiments carried on a real taxi dataset showed the validity of our model. It can predict the taxi flow at a given urban intersection with high accuracy.