No Arabic abstract
Estimating the travel time of any route is of great importance for trip planners, traffic operators, online taxi dispatching and ride-sharing platforms, and navigation provider systems. With the advance of technology, many traveling cars, including online taxi dispatch systems vehicles are equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices that can report the location of the vehicle every few seconds. This paper uses GPS data and the Matrix Factorization techniques to estimate the travel times on all road segments and time intervals simultaneously. We aggregate GPS data into a matrix, where each cell of the original matrix contains the average vehicle speed for a segment and a specific time interval. One of the problems with this matrix is its high sparsity. We use Alternating Least Squares (ALS) method along with a regularization term to factorize the matrix. Since this approach can solve the sparsity problem that arises from the absence of cars in many road segments in a specific time interval, matrix factorization is suitable for estimating the travel time. Our comprehensive evaluation results using real data provided by one of the largest online taxi dispatching systems in Iran, shows the strength of our proposed method.
Taxi arrival time prediction is an essential part of building intelligent transportation systems. Traditional arrival time estimation methods mainly rely on traffic map feature extraction, which can not model complex situations and nonlinear spatial and temporal relationships. Therefore, we propose a Multi-View Spatial-Temporal Model (MVSTM) to capture the dependence of spatial-temporal and trajectory. Specifically, we use graph2vec to model the spatial view, dual-channel temporal module to model the trajectory view, and structural embedding to model the traffic semantics. Experiments on large-scale taxi trajectory data show that our approach is more effective than the novel method. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/775269512/SIGSPATIAL-2021-GISCUP-4th-Solution.
Urban rail transit (URT) system plays a dominating role in many megacities like Beijing and Hong Kong. Due to its important role and complex nature, it is always in great need for public agencies to better understand the performance of the URT system. This paper focuses on an essential and hard problem to estimate the network-wide link travel time and station waiting time using the automatic fare collection (AFC) data in the URT system, which is beneficial to better understand the system-wide real-time operation state. The emerging data-driven techniques, such as computational graph (CG) models in the machine learning field, provide a new solution for solving this problem. In this study, we first formulate a data-driven estimation optimization framework to estimate the link travel time and station waiting time. Then, we cast the estimation optimization model into a CG framework to solve the optimization problem and obtain the estimation results. The methodology is verified on a synthetic URT network and applied to a real-world URT network using the synthetic and real-world AFC data, respectively. Results show the robustness and effectiveness of the CG-based framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the CG is applied to the URT. This study can provide critical insights to better understand the operational state in URT.
We address two shortcomings in online travel time estimation methods for congested urban traffic. The first shortcoming is related to the determination of the number of mixture modes, which can change dynamically, within day and from day to day. The second shortcoming is the wide-spread use of Gaussian probability densities as mixture components. Gaussian densities fail to capture the positive skew in travel time distributions and, consequently, large numbers of mixture components are needed for reasonable fitting accuracy when applied as mixture components. They also assign positive probabilities to negative travel times. To address these issues, this paper derives a mixture distribution with Gamma component densities, which are asymmetric and supported on the positive numbers. We use sparse estimation techniques to ensure parsimonious models and propose a generalization of Gamma mixture densities using Mittag-Leffler functions, which provides enhanced fitting flexibility and improved parsimony. In order to accommodate within-day variability and allow for online implementation of the proposed methodology (i.e., fast computations on streaming travel time data), we introduce a recursive algorithm which efficiently updates the fitted distribution whenever new data become available. Experimental results using real-world travel time data illustrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.
We propose an algorithm to impute and forecast a time series by transforming the observed time series into a matrix, utilizing matrix estimation to recover missing values and de-noise observed entries, and performing linear regression to make predictions. At the core of our analysis is a representation result, which states that for a large model class, the transformed time series matrix is (approximately) low-rank. In effect, this generalizes the widely used Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) in time series literature, and allows us to establish a rigorous link between time series analysis and matrix estimation. The key to establishing this link is constructing a Page matrix with non-overlapping entries rather than a Hankel matrix as is commonly done in the literature (e.g., SSA). This particular matrix structure allows us to provide finite sample analysis for imputation and prediction, and prove the asymptotic consistency of our method. Another salient feature of our algorithm is that it is model agnostic with respect to both the underlying time dynamics and the noise distribution in the observations. The noise agnostic property of our approach allows us to recover the latent states when only given access to noisy and partial observations a la a Hidden Markov Model; e.g., recovering the time-varying parameter of a Poisson process without knowing that the underlying process is Poisson. Furthermore, since our forecasting algorithm requires regression with noisy features, our approach suggests a matrix estimation based method - coupled with a novel, non-standard matrix estimation error metric - to solve the error-in-variable regression problem, which could be of interest in its own right. Through synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms standard software packages (including R libraries) in the presence of missing data as well as high levels of noise.
Unwanted interaction between a quantum system and its fluctuating environment leads to decoherence and is the primary obstacle to establishing a scalable quantum information processing architecture. Strategies such as environmental and materials engineering, quantum error correction and dynamical decoupling can mitigate decoherence, but generally increase experimental complexity. Here we improve coherence in a qubit using real-time Hamiltonian parameter estimation. Using a rapidly converging Bayesian approach, we precisely measure the splitting in a singlet-triplet spin qubit faster than the surrounding nuclear bath fluctuates. We continuously adjust qubit control parameters based on this information, thereby improving the inhomogenously broadened coherence time ($T_{2}^{*}$) from tens of nanoseconds to above 2 $mu$s and demonstrating the effectiveness of Hamiltonian estimation in reducing the effects of correlated noise in quantum systems. Because the technique demonstrated here is compatible with arbitrary qubit operations, it is a natural complement to quantum error correction and can be used to improve the performance of a wide variety of qubits in both metrological and quantum-information-processing applications.