Forecasting the Carsharing Service Demand Using Uni and Multivariable Models

Abstract Car-sharing is an alternative to urban mobility that has been widely adopted. However, this approach is prone to several problems, such as fleet imbalance, due to the variance of the daily demand in large urban centers. In this work, we apply two time series techniques, namely, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Prophet, to infer the demand for three real car-sharing services. We also apply several state-of-the-art models on free-floating data in order to get a better understanding of what works best for this type of data. In addition to historical data, we also use climatic attributes in LSTM applications. As a result, the addition of meteorological data improved the model’s performance, especially on Evo: an average Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of approximately 61.13 travels was obtained with the demand data on Evo, while MAE equals 32.72 travels was observed when adding the climatic data, the other datasets also improved but none other improved this much. For the free-floating data test, we got the Boosting Algorithms (XGBoost, Catboost, and LightGBM) got the best performance short term, the worst one has an improvement of around 22% of MAE over the next best-ranked (Prophet). Meanwhile in the long term Prophet got the best MAE result, around 22.5% better than the second-best (LSTM).