A Dynamic Convolutional Neural Network Based Shared-Bike Demand Forecasting Model

Bike-sharing systems are becoming popular and generate a large volume of trajectory data. In a bike-sharing system, users can borrow and return bikes at different stations. In particular, a bike-sharing system will be affected by weather, the time period, and other dynamic factors, which challenges the scheduling of shared bikes. In this article, a new shared-bike demand forecasting model based on dynamic convolutional neural networks, called SDF, is proposed to predict the demand of shared bikes. SDF chooses the most relevant weather features from real weather data by using the Pearson correlation coefficient and transforms them into a two-dimensional dynamic feature matrix, taking into account the states of stations from historical data. The feature information in the matrix is extracted, learned, and trained with a newly proposed dynamic convolutional neural network to predict the demand of shared bikes in a dynamical and intelligent fashion. The phase of parameter update is optimized from three aspects: the loss function, optimization algorithm, and learning rate. Then, an accurate shared-bike demand forecasting model is designed based on the basic idea of minimizing the loss value. By comparing with classical machine learning models, the weight sharing strategy employed by SDF reduces the complexity of the network. It allows a high prediction accuracy to be achieved within a relatively short period of time. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world bike-sharing datasets to evaluate SDF. The results show that SDF significantly outperforms classical machine learning models in prediction accuracy and efficiency.