Cross-Modality and Equity-Aware Graph Pooling Fusion: A Bike Mobility Prediction Study

We propose an equity-aware GRAph-fusion differentiable Pooling neural network to accurately predict the spatio-temporal urban mobility (e.g., station-level bike usage in terms of departures and arrivals) with Equity (GRAPE). GRAPE consists of two independent hierarchical graph neural networks for two mobility systems—one as a target graph (i.e., a bike sharing system) and the other as an auxiliary graph (e.g., a taxi system). We have designed a convolutional fusion mechanism to jointly fuse the target and auxiliary graph embeddings and extract the shared spatial and temporal mobility patterns within the embeddings to enhance prediction accuracy. To further improve the equity of bike sharing systems for diverse communities, we focus on the bike resource allocation and model prediction performance, and propose to regularize the predicted bike resource as well as the accuracy across advantaged and disadvantaged communities, and thus mitigate the potential unfairness in the predicted bike sharing usage. Our evaluation of over 23 million bike rides and 100 million taxi trips in New York City and Chicago has demonstrated GRAPE to outperform all of the baseline approaches in terms of prediction accuracy (by 15.80% for NYC and 50.55% for Chicago on average) and social equity awareness (by 32.44% and 24.43% in terms of resource fairness for NYC and Chicago, and 13.36% and 16.52% in terms of performance fairness).