ADST: Forecasting Metro Flow Using Attention-Based Deep Spatial-Temporal Networks with Multi-Task Learning.

Passenger flow prediction has drawn increasing attention in the deep learning research field due to its great importance in traffic management and public safety. The major challenge of this essential task lies in multiple spatiotemporal correlations that exhibit complex non-linear correlations. Although both the spatial and temporal perspectives have been considered in modeling, most existing works have ignored complex temporal correlations or underlying spatial similarity. In this paper, we identify the unique spatiotemporal correlation of urban metro flow, and propose an attention-based deep spatiotemporal network with multi-task learning (ADST-Net) at a citywide level to predict the future flow from historical observations. ADST-Net uses three independent channels with the same structure to model the recent, daily-periodic and weekly-periodic complicated spatiotemporal correlations, respectively. Specifically, each channel uses the framework of residual networks, the rectified block and the multi-scale convolutions to mine spatiotemporal correlations. The residual networks can effectively overcome the gradient vanishing problem. The rectified block adopts an attentional mechanism to automatically reweigh measurements at different time intervals, and the multi-scale convolutions are used to extract explicit spatial relationships. ADST-Net also introduces an external embedding mechanism to extract the influence of external factors on flow prediction, such as weather conditions. Furthermore, we enforce multi-task learning to utilize transition passenger flow volume prediction as an auxiliary task during the training process for generalization. Through this model, we can not only capture the steady trend, but also the sudden changes of passenger flow. Extensive experimental results on two real-world traffic flow datasets demonstrate the obvious improvement and superior performance of our proposed algorithm compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

A Fast Indoor/Outdoor Transition Detection Algorithm Based on Machine Learning.

The widespread popularity of smartphones makes it possible to provide Location-Based Services (LBS) in a variety of complex scenarios. The location and contextual status, especially the Indoor/Outdoor switching, provides a direct indicator for seamless indoor and outdoor positioning and navigation. It is challenging to quickly detect indoor and outdoor transitions with high confidence due to a variety of signal variations in complex scenarios and the similarity of indoor and outdoor signal sources in the IO transition regions. In this paper, we consider the challenge of switching quickly in IO transition regions with high detection accuracy in complex scenarios. Towards this end, we analyze and extract spatial geometry distribution, time sequence and statistical features under different sliding windows from GNSS measurements in Android smartphones and present a novel IO detection method employing an ensemble model based on stacking and filtering the detection result by Hidden Markov Model. We evaluated our algorithm on four datasets. The results showed that our proposed algorithm was capable of identifying IO state with 99.11% accuracy in indoor and outdoor environment where we have collected data and 97.02% accuracy in new indoor and outdoor scenarios. Furthermore, in the scenario of indoor and outdoor transition where we have collected data, the recognition accuracy reaches 94.53% and the probability of switching delay within 3 s exceeds 80%. In the new scenario, the recognition accuracy reaches 92.80% and the probability of switching delay within 4 s exceeds 80%.