A novel ensemble model with conditional intervening opportunities for ride-hailing travel mobility estimation

Accurate estimation of ride-hailing travel mobility is significant for demand management, and transportation planning. Although existing intervening opportunities models based on individual destination selection behavior can estimate travel mobility patterns (e.g., commuter flow, and migration flow), they usually ignore the substitutability of candidate destinations. In the context of ride-hailing travel, people tend to have strong destination preferences, and candidate destinations should be related to individual travel needs. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence offers powerful tools to extract complex nonlinear dependencies of mobility data, which are difficult to capture by traditional intervention opportunities models. This paper proposes a novel ensemble model with conditional intervening opportunities to improve the accuracy of ride-hailing travel mobility estimation by considering the substitutability of candidate destinations, that is, only the location related to people’s trip purpose will likely affect people’s travel behavior. The proposed ensemble model employs a stacking strategy to integrate six advanced machine learning and deep learning algorithms to extract complex nonlinear dependencies from ride-hailing travel mobility data, and achieve accurate mobility estimation. Furthermore, datasets from two major cities in China with more than 25 million ride-hailing trips are used for model training and experimental comparison. The results indicate that the proposed model outperforms other baseline models in ride-hailing travel mobility estimation tasks. It accurately predicts trip flows and the trip distance distribution, and can capture mobility patterns with strong interpretability. The proposed model can be applied to analyze the travel behavior of ride-hailing passengers, as well as the mobility patterns between different regions.