Enhancing the Accuracy of Peak Hourly Demand in Bike-Sharing Systems using a Graph Convolutional Network with Public Transit Usage Data

Abstract

With the growth of the bike-sharing system, the problem of demand forecasting has become important to the bike-sharing system. This study aims to develop a novel prediction model that enhances the accuracy of the peak hourly demand. A spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (STGCN) is constructed to consider both the spatial and temporal features. One of the model’s essential steps is determining the main component of the adjacency matrix and the node feature matrix. To achieve this, 131 days of data from the bike-sharing system in Seoul are used and experiments conducted on the models with various adjacency matrices and node feature matrices, including public transit usage. The results indicate that the STGCN models reflecting the previous demand pattern to the adjacency matrix show outstanding performance in predicting demand compared with the other models. The results also show that the model that includes bus boarding and alighting records is more accurate than the model that contains subway records, inferring that buses have a greater connection to bike-sharing than the subway. The proposed STGCN with public transit data contributes to the alleviation of unmet demand by enhancing the accuracy in predicting peak demand.