UCTB: An Urban Computing Tool Box for Building Spatiotemporal Prediction Services
This provides a practical solution for researchers and practitioners in smart cities, though it is incremental as it packages existing methods rather than introducing new ones.
The authors tackled the challenges of integrating diverse domain knowledge and reproducing complex deep learning models in spatiotemporal crowd flow prediction by developing UCTB, an open-source toolbox that combines multiple domain factors and state-of-the-art models.
Spatiotemporal crowd flow prediction is one of the key technologies in smart cities. Currently, there are two major pain points that plague related research and practitioners. Firstly, crowd flow is related to multiple domain knowledge factors; however, due to the diversity of application scenarios, it is difficult for subsequent work to make reasonable and comprehensive use of domain knowledge. Secondly, with the development of deep learning technology, the implementation of relevant techniques has become increasingly complex; reproducing advanced models has become a time-consuming and increasingly cumbersome task. To address these issues, we design and implement a spatiotemporal crowd flow prediction toolbox called UCTB (Urban Computing Tool Box), which integrates multiple spatiotemporal domain knowledge and state-of-the-art models simultaneously. The relevant code and supporting documents have been open-sourced at https://github.com/uctb/UCTB.