Hunting or waiting? Discovering passenger-finding strategies from a large-scale real-world taxi dataset

In modern cities, more and more vehicles, such as taxis, have been equipped with GPS devices for localization and navigation. Gathering and analyzing these large-scale real-world digital traces have provided us an unprecedented opportunity to understand the city dynamics and reveal the hidden social and economic “realities”. One innovative pervasive application is to provide correct driving strategies to taxi drivers according to time and location. In this paper, we aim to discover both efficient and inefficient passenger-finding strategies from a large-scale taxi GPS dataset, which was collected from 5350 taxis for one year in a large city of China. By representing the passenger-finding strategies in a Time-Location-Strategy feature triplet and constructing a train/test dataset containing both top- and ordinary-performance taxi features, we adopt a powerful feature selection tool, L1-Norm SVM, to select the most salient feature patterns determining the taxi performance. We find that the selected patterns can well interpret the empirical study results derived from raw data analysis and even reveal interesting hidden “facts”. Moreover, the taxi performance predictor built on the selected features can achieve a prediction accuracy of 85.3% on a new test dataset, and it also outperforms the one based on all the features, which implies that the selected features are indeed the right indicators of the passenger-finding strategies.