Accurate travel products price forecasting is a highly desired feature that allows customers to take informed decisions about purchases, and companies to build and offer attractive tour packages. Thanks to machine learning (ML), it is now relatively cheap to develop highly accurate statistical models for price time-series forecasting. However, once models are deployed in production, it is their monitoring, maintenance and improvement which carry most of the costs and difficulties over time. We introduce a data-driven framework to continuously monitor and maintain deployed time-series forecasting models' performance, to guarantee stable performance of travel products price forecasting models. Under a supervised learning approach, we predict the errors of time-series forecasting models over time, and use this predicted performance measure to achieve both model monitoring and maintenance. We validate the proposed method on a dataset of 18K time-series from flight and hotel prices collected over two years and on two public benchmarks.
Accurate forecasting of passenger flow (i.e., ridership) is critical to the operation of urban metro systems. Previous studies mainly model passenger flow as time series by aggregating individual trips and then perform forecasting based on the values in the past several steps. However, this approach essentially overlooks the fact that passenger flow consists of trips from each individual traveler. For example, a traveler's work trip in the morning can help predict his/her home trip in the evening, while this causal structure cannot be explicitly encoded in standard time series models. In this …
China University of Geosciences, Beijing（中国地质大学（北京））；University of Nottingham Ningbo China（宁波诺丁汉大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Parking demand forecasting and behaviour analysis have received increasing attention in recent years because of their critical role in mitigating traffic congestion and understanding travel behaviours. However, previous studies usually only consider temporal dependence but ignore the spatial correlations among parking lots for parking prediction. This is mainly due to the lack of direct physical connections or observable interactions between them. Thus, how to quantify the spatial correlation remains a significant challenge. To bridge the gap, in this study, we propose a spatial-aware parking …
I overview recent research advances in Bayesian state-space modeling of multivariate time series. A main focus is on the decouple/recouple concept that enables application of state-space models to increasingly large-scale data, applying to continuous or discrete time series outcomes. The scope includes large-scale dynamic graphical models for forecasting and multivariate volatility analysis in areas such as economics and finance, multi-scale approaches for forecasting discrete/count time series in areas such as commercial sales and demand forecasting, and dynamic network flow models for areas …
In mid of March 2020, Coronaviruses such as COVID-19 is declared as an international epidemic. More than 125000 confirmed cases and 4,607 death cases have been recorded around more than 118 countries. Unfortunately, a coronavirus vaccine is expected to take at least 18 months if it works at all. Moreover, COVID -19 epidemics can mutate into a more aggressive form. Day level information about the COVID -19 spread is crucial to measure the behavior of this new virus globally. Therefore, this study presents a comparison of day level forecasting models on COVID-19 affected cases using time series …
University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；PingAn Technology（平安科技）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
Air pollution poses a serious threat to human health as well as economic development around the world. To meet the increasing demand for accurate predictions for air pollutions, we proposed a Deep Inferential Spatial-Temporal Network to deal with the complicated non-linear spatial and temporal correlations. We forecast three air pollutants (i.e., PM2.5, PM10 and O3) of monitoring stations over the next 48 hours, using a hybrid deep learning model consists of inferential predictor (inference for regions without air pollution readings), spatial predictor (capturing spatial correlations using CNN…
Systems are commonly monitored for health and security through collection and streaming of multivariate time series. Advances in time series forecasting due to adoption of multilayer recurrent neural network architectures make it possible to forecast in high-dimensional time series, and identify and classify novelties early, based on subtle changes in the trends. However, mainstream approaches to multi-variate time series predictions do not handle well cases when the ongoing forecast must include uncertainty, nor they are robust to missing data. We introduce a new architecture for time series …
Accurate forecasting of bus travel time and its uncertainty is critical to service quality and operation of transit systems; for example, it can help passengers make better decisions on departure time, route choice, and even transport mode choice and also support transit operators to make informed decisions on tasks such as crew/vehicle scheduling and timetabling. However, most existing approaches in bus travel time forecasting are based on deterministic models that provide only point estimation. To this end, we develop in this paper a Bayesian probabilistic forecasting model for bus travel ti…
The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion, with illustrating examples, on Bayesian forecasting for dynamic generalized linear models (DGLMs). Adopting approximate Bayesian analysis, based on conjugate forms and on Bayes linear estimation, we describe the theoretical framework and then we provide detailed examples of response distributions, including binomial, Poisson, negative binomial, geometric, normal, log-normal, gamma, exponential, Weibull, Pareto, beta, and inverse Gaussian. We give numerical illustrations for all distributions (except for the normal). Putting together all the…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Tropical cyclone (TC) intensity forecasts are ultimately issued by human forecasters. The human in-the-loop pipeline requires that any forecasting guidance must be easily digestible by TC experts if it is to be adopted at operational centers like the National Hurricane Center. Our proposed framework leverages deep learning to provide forecasters with something neither end-to-end prediction models nor traditional intensity guidance does: a powerful tool for monitoring high-dimensional time series of key physically relevant predictors and the means to understand how the predictors relate to one …
We propose two specifications of a real-time mixed-frequency semi-structural time series model for evaluating the output potential, output gap, Phillips curve, and Okun's law for the US. The baseline model uses minimal theory-based multivariate identification restrictions to inform trend-cycle decomposition, while the alternative model adds the CBO's output gap measure as an observed variable. The latter model results in a smoother output potential and lower cyclical correlation between inflation and real variables but performs worse in forecasting beyond the short term. This methodology allow…
GraphSVR: A Graph Convolutional Support Vector Regression Framework for Robust Spatiotemporal Air Pollution Forecasting
Department of Mathematics, School of Advanced Sciences, Vellore Institute of Technology（维杰雷理工学院数学系）；SAFIR, Sorbonne University（索邦大学SAFIR中心）；Statistics Centre Abu Dhabi（阿布扎希统计中心）
Reliable estimates of typical travel times allow road users to forward plan journeys to minimise travel time, potentially increasing overall system efficiency. On busy highways, however, congestion events can cause large, short-term spikes in travel time. These spikes make direct forecasting of travel time using standard time series models difficult on the timescales of hours to days that are relevant to forward planning. The problem is that some such spikes are caused by unpredictable incidents and should be filtered out, whereas others are caused by recurrent peaks in demand and should be fa…
United States Geological Survey（美国地质调查局）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Active volcanoes are globally distributed and pose societal risks at multiple geographic scales, ranging from local hazards to regional/international disruptions. Many volcanoes do not have continuous ground monitoring networks; meaning that satellite observations provide the only record of volcanic behavior and unrest. Among these remote sensing observations, thermal imagery is inspected daily by volcanic observatories for examining the early signs, onset, and evolution of eruptive activity. However, thermal scenes are often obstructed by clouds, meaning that forecasts must be made off image …
Contemporary power grids are being challenged by rapid voltage fluctuations that are caused by large-scale deployment of renewable generation, electric vehicles, and demand response programs. In this context, monitoring the grid's operating conditions in real time becomes increasingly critical. With the emergent large scale and nonconvexity however, the existing power system state estimation (PSSE) schemes become computationally expensive or yield suboptimal performance. To bypass these hurdles, this paper advocates deep neural networks (DNNs) for real-time power system monitoring. By unrollin…
Short-term traffic flow prediction is one of the crucial issues in intelligent transportation system, which is an important part of smart cities. Accurate predictions can enable both the drivers and the passengers to make better decisions about their travel route, departure time and travel origin selection, which can be helpful in traffic management. Multiple models and algorithms based on time series prediction and machine learning were applied to this issue and achieved acceptable results. Recently, the availability of sufficient data and computational power, motivates us to improve the pred…
Literature suggests that preferences, as denoted by taste parameters and consideration sets, may evolve over time in response to changes in demographic and situational variables, psychological, sociological and biological constructs, and available alternatives and their attributes. However, existing representations typically overlook the influence of past experiences on present preferences. This study develops, applies and tests a hidden Markov model with a discrete choice kernel to model and forecast the evolution of individual preferences and behaviors over long-range forecasting horizons. T…
Discovering patterns and detecting anomalies in individual travel behavior is a crucial problem in both research and practice. In this paper, we address this problem by building a probabilistic framework to model individual spatiotemporal travel behavior data (e.g., trip records and trajectory data). We develop a two-dimensional latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to characterize the generative mechanism of spatiotemporal trip records of each traveler. This model introduces two separate factor matrices for the spatial dimension and the temporal dimension, respectively, and use a two-dimens…
Real time large scale streaming data pose major challenges to forecasting, in particular defying the presence of human experts to perform the corresponding analysis. We present here a class of models and methods used to develop an automated, scalable and versatile system for large scale forecasting oriented towards safety and security monitoring. Our system provides short and long term forecasts and uses them to detect safety and security issues in relation with multiple internet connected devices well in advance they might take place.
Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are expected to yield significant improvements in safety, energy efficiency, and time utilization. However, their net effect on energy and environmental outcomes is unclear. Higher fuel economy reduces the energy required per mile of travel, but it also reduces the fuel cost of travel, incentivizing more travel and causing an energy "rebound effect." Moreover, CAVs are predicted to vastly reduce the time cost of travel, inducing further increases in travel and energy use. In this paper, we forecast the induced travel and rebound from CAVs using data on e…
Multi-spatial Multi-temporal Air Quality Forecasting with Integrated Monitoring and Reanalysis Data
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工高等研究院宁波数字孪生研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Mälardalens University（梅拉达伦大学）
Current travel demand models are unable to predict long-range trends in travel behavior as they do not entail a mechanism that projects membership and market share of new modes of transport (Uber, Lyft, etc). We propose integrating discrete choice and technology adoption models to address the aforementioned issue. In order to do so, we build on the formulation of discrete mixture models and specifically Latent Class Choice Models (LCCMs), which were integrated with a network effect model. The network effect model quantifies the impact of the spatial/network effect of the new technology on the …
