Joint demand prediction for multimodal systems: A multi-task multi-relational spatiotemporal graph neural network approach

Dynamic demand prediction is crucial for the efficient operation and management of urban transportation systems. Extensive research has been conducted on single-mode demand prediction, ignoring the fact that the demands for different transportation modes can be correlated with each other. Despite some recent efforts, existing approaches to multimodal demand prediction are generally not flexible enough to account for spatiotemporal correlations across different modes with heterogeneous spatial units. To tackle these issues, this study proposes a multi-relational spatiotemporal graph neural network (ST-MRGNN) for multimodal demand prediction. Specifically, the spatial dependencies across modes are encoded with multiple intra- and inter-modal relation graphs. A multi-relational graph neural network (MRGNN) is introduced to capture cross-mode heterogeneous spatial dependencies, consisting of generalized graph convolution networks to learn the message passing mechanisms within relation graphs and an attention-based aggregation module to summarize different relations. We further integrate MRGNNs with temporal gated convolution layers to jointly model spatiotemporal correlations. Extensive experiments are conducted using real-world subway and ride-hailing datasets from New York City, and the results verify the improved performance of our proposed approach over existing methods across modes. The improvement is particularly large for demand-sparse locations. Further analysis of the attention mechanisms of ST-MRGNN also demonstrates its good interpretability for understanding cross-mode interactions.