Pedestrian Flow Prediction and Route Recommendation with Business Events

Due to the potential economic benefits, pedestrian flow is considered an essential indication of public spaces. Pedestrian flow prediction is designed to assist operators in making decisions (such as shopping center owners). Operators hold certain events, such as sales promotions, to attract surrounding pedestrians; we refer to this type of event as a business event. Business events attract pedestrian flows, which means business opportunities for the merchants. Moreover, their placement will affect the distributions of the pedestrian flows. However, deciding which route is chosen for a specified event is difficult. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to consider business events when predicting pedestrian flow. In this paper, we investigate two problems: one is pedestrian flow prediction with business events, and the other is route recommendation for business events. First, we propose an Attraction-Based Matrix Factorization model (ABMF) to efficiently predict the pedestrian flow with business events, which introduces the attraction index of different categories to pedestrians in matrix factorization. Second, we leverage the Skip-gram mode to learn the latent representations and improve the pair-wise ranking loss to a flow-aware-based method (SG-FWARP), which aims to learn events' latent representations for route recommendation. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the experimental results show ABMF can predict pedestrian flow matrix with a similarity of over 0.9 compared with the ground truth, and SG-FWARP can recommend routes for business events with high accuracy.