Map Enhanced Route Travel Time Prediction using Deep Neural Networks
This work addresses a specific problem in transportation science by enhancing route travel time prediction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods by adding road network features.
The paper tackles travel time prediction by incorporating road network information into deep learning models, resulting in improved performance especially with small training data and when road distance differs significantly from straight-line distance.
Travel time estimation is a fundamental problem in transportation science with extensive literature. The study of these techniques has intensified due to availability of many publicly available large trip datasets. Recently developed deep learning based models have improved the generality and performance and have focused on estimating times for individual sub-trajectories and aggregating them to predict the travel time of the entire trajectory. However, these techniques ignore the road network information. In this work, we propose and study techniques for incorporating road networks along with historical trips' data into travel time prediction. We incorporate both node embeddings as well as road distance into the existing model. Experiments on large real-world benchmark datasets suggest improved performance, especially when the train data is small. As expected, the proposed method performs better than the baseline when there is a larger difference between road distance and Vincenty distance between start and end points.