Optimizing Bike Sharing System Flows using Graph Mining, Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: A Bicycle-sharing system (BSS) is a popular service scheme deployed in cities of different sizes around the world. Although docked bike systems are its most popular model used, it still experiences a number of weaknesses that could be optimized by investigating bike sharing network properties and evolution of obtained patterns.Efficiently keeping bicycle-sharing system as balanced as possible is the main problem and thus, predicting or minimizing the manual transportation of bikes across the city is the prime objective in order to save logistic costs for operating companies.The purpose of this thesis is two-fold; Firstly, it is to visualize bike flow using data exploration methods and statistical analysis to better understand mobility characteristics with respect to distance, duration, time of the day, spatial distribution, weather circumstances, and other attributes. Secondly, by obtaining flow visualizations, it is possible to focus on specific directed sub-graphs containing only those pairs of stations whose mutual flow difference is the most asymmetric. By doing so, we are able to use graph mining and machine learning techniques on these unbalanced stations.Identification of spatial structures and their structural change can be captured using Convolutional neural network (CNN) that takes adjacency matrix snapshots of unbalanced sub-graphs. A generated structure from the previous method is then used in the Long short-term memory artificial recurrent neural network (RNN LSTM) in order to find and predict its dynamic patterns.As a result, we are predicting bike flows for each node in the possible future sub-graph configuration, which in turn informs bicycle-sharing system owners in advance to plan accordingly. This combination of methods notifies them which prospective areas they should focus on more and how many bike relocation phases are to be expected. Methods are evaluated using Cross validation (CV), Root mean square error (RMSE) and Mean average error (MAE) metrics. Benefits are identified both for urban city planning and for bike sharing companies by saving time and minimizing their cost.