Hierarchical Bayesian Nonparametric Approach to Modeling and Learning the Wisdom of Crowds of Urban Traffic Route Planning Agents

Route prediction is important to analyzing and understanding the route patterns and behavior of traffic crowds. Its objective is to predict the most likely or "popular" route of road segments from a given point in a road network. This paper presents a hierarchical Bayesian non-parametric approach to efficient and scalable route prediction that can harness the wisdom of crowds of route planning agents by aggregating their sequential routes of possibly varying lengths and origin-destination pairs. In particular, our approach has the advantages of (a) not requiring a Markov assumption to be imposed and (b) generalizing well with sparse data, thus resulting in significantly improved prediction accuracy, as demonstrated empirically using real-world taxi route data. We also show two practical applications of our route prediction algorithm: predictive taxi ranking and route recommendation.