Uncertainty Quantification via Spatial-Temporal Tweedie Model for Zero-inflated and Long-tail Travel Demand Prediction
This work addresses the challenge of uncertainty quantification for transportation management, offering a domain-specific solution for zero-inflated and long-tail data patterns.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting sparse and long-tail travel demand in high-resolution Origin-Destination matrices, proposing a Spatial-Temporal Tweedie Graph Neural Network (STTD) that improved prediction accuracy and provided precise confidence intervals.
Understanding Origin-Destination (O-D) travel demand is crucial for transportation management. However, traditional spatial-temporal deep learning models grapple with addressing the sparse and long-tail characteristics in high-resolution O-D matrices and quantifying prediction uncertainty. This dilemma arises from the numerous zeros and over-dispersed demand patterns within these matrices, which challenge the Gaussian assumption inherent to deterministic deep learning models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach: the Spatial-Temporal Tweedie Graph Neural Network (STTD). The STTD introduces the Tweedie distribution as a compelling alternative to the traditional 'zero-inflated' model and leverages spatial and temporal embeddings to parameterize travel demand distributions. Our evaluations using real-world datasets highlight STTD's superiority in providing accurate predictions and precise confidence intervals, particularly in high-resolution scenarios.