NYC Taxi Trip Duration Prediction using Machine Learning - Step by Step Guide
Did you know that in City Island and Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, and Great Kills and Great Kills Park in Staten Island green cab taxis are more popular than yellow or for-hire cab taxis?
Did you know that you end up spending more time traveling (~12 minutes) on average in for-hire cab taxis as compared to yellow cab taxis?
You must know that Manhattan (Upper East Side North being the most prominent) and JFK Airport are the busiest areas for yellow cab taxis but did you know that Jackson Heights and Astoria in Queens and Stapleton in Staten Island are the most sort after by for-hire cabs?
Welcome to the blog post, today we explore the data provided by New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission(TLC) on their website using Pandas, Numpy, and Sklearn in Python. You can also download the data using the AWS CLI using (Access No AWS account required):
aws s3 sync s3://nyc-tlc/ . --no-sign-request
The main purpose of this post is to develop a basic machine learning model, to predict the average travel time and fare for a given Pickup location, Drop location, Date, and Time. Every organization nowadays has to utilize its data properly to get an edge over its competitors and provide more value to customers. Machine learning has become a very important tool in making important business decisions and even people with no coding knowledge or domain experience can develop models with libraries such as data prep, and sklearn. Scikit learn is one of the most powerful machine learning libraries out there. It is used by major corporations around the work such as J.P.Morgan, Spotify, Evernote, and many more.
Note: The package is named scikit-learn therefore you can do
pip install scikit-learn
however, inside your python file, you’d have to do
import sklearn
We will look at only one month of data as the entire data would be 100 GB+ and more than what a single machine can handle (probably we will have a post in the future about distributed machine learning techniques).
import pandas as pd
import datetime as dt
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as snsfrom sklearn.linear_model
import LinearRegressionimport numpy as np
We will import the libraries and download the data from the source mentioned above and load the data as a pandas dataframe:
green_taxi_data = pd.read_csv('green_tripdata_2020-12.csv')
yellow_taxi_data = pd.read_csv('yellow_tripdata_2020-12.csv')
fhv_taxi_data = pd.read_csv('fhv_tripdata_2020-12.csv')
We have three different data sets, namely, green taxi, yellow taxi, and for-hire which would include Uber and Lyft. You can also look at the taxi zone lookup table to understand the data pickup and drop locations:
Next, we explore the data set and the fields available. In summary, we have fare and distance fields available for the green and yellow cabs but not for for-hire cabs. So as a fun exercise we would try to compute the total fares for-hire cabs (assuming they are similar to yellow cabs; which is not the case).
green_taxi_data.info()
yellow_taxi_data.info()
fhv_taxi_data.info()
The output of the above is which you can skip as well, the main columns of interest are the PULocationID and DOLocationID.
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<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 83130 entries, 0 to 83129
Data columns (total 20 columns):
# Column Non-Null Count Dtype
--- ------ -------------- -----
0 VendorID 46292 non-null float64
1 lpep_pickup_datetime 83130 non-null object
2 lpep_dropoff_datetime 83130 non-null object
3 store_and_fwd_flag 46292 non-null object
4 RatecodeID 46292 non-null float64
5 PULocationID 83130 non-null int64
6 DOLocationID 83130 non-null int64
7 passenger_count 46292 non-null float64
8 trip_distance 83130 non-null float64
9 fare_amount 83130 non-null float64
10 extra 83130 non-null float64
11 mta_tax 83130 non-null float64
12 tip_amount 83130 non-null float64
13 tolls_amount 83130 non-null float64
14 ehail_fee 0 non-null float64
15 improvement_surcharge 83130 non-null float64
16 total_amount 83130 non-null float64
17 payment_type 46292 non-null float64
18 trip_type 46292 non-null float64
19 congestion_surcharge 46292 non-null float64
dtypes: float64(15), int64(2), object(3)
memory usage: 12.7+ MB
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 1461897 entries, 0 to 1461896
Data columns (total 18 columns):
# Column Non-Null Count Dtype
--- ------ -------------- -----
0 VendorID 1362441 non-null float64
1 tpep_pickup_datetime 1461897 non-null object
2 tpep_dropoff_datetime 1461897 non-null object
3 passenger_count 1362441 non-null float64
4 trip_distance 1461897 non-null float64
5 RatecodeID 1362441 non-null float64
6 store_and_fwd_flag 1362441 non-null object
7 PULocationID 1461897 non-null int64
8 DOLocationID 1461897 non-null int64
9 payment_type 1362441 non-null float64
10 fare_amount 1461897 non-null float64
11 extra 1461897 non-null float64
12 mta_tax 1461897 non-null float64
13 tip_amount 1461897 non-null float64
14 tolls_amount 1461897 non-null float64
15 improvement_surcharge 1461897 non-null float64
16 total_amount 1461897 non-null float64
17 congestion_surcharge 1461897 non-null float64
dtypes: float64(13), int64(2), object(3)
memory usage: 200.8+ MB
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 1151404 entries, 0 to 1151403
Data columns (total 7 columns):
# Column Non-Null Count Dtype
--- ------ -------------- -----
0 dispatching_base_num 1151404 non-null object
1 pickup_datetime 1151404 non-null object
2 dropoff_datetime 1151404 non-null object
3 PULocationID 190903 non-null float64
4 DOLocationID 981028 non-null float64
5 SR_Flag 0 non-null float64
6 Affiliated_base_number 1141618 non-null object
dtypes: float64(3), object(4)
memory usage: 61.5+ MB
Next, we convert the data and develop basic plots:
green_taxi_data['lpep_pickup_datetime'] = pd.to_datetime(green_taxi_data['lpep_pickup_datetime'], format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
green_taxi_data['lpep_dropoff_datetime'] = pd.to_datetime(green_taxi_data['lpep_dropoff_datetime'], format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
green_taxi_data['trip_duration'] = (green_taxi_data['lpep_dropoff_datetime'] -
green_taxi_data['lpep_pickup_datetime']).dt.secondsgreen_taxi_data['PULocationID'].fillna(-1, inplace = True)
green_taxi_data['DOLocationID'].fillna(-1, inplace = True)
yellow_taxi_data['tpep_pickup_datetime'] = pd.to_datetime(yellow_taxi_data['tpep_pickup_datetime'], format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
yellow_taxi_data['tpep_dropoff_datetime'] = pd.to_datetime(yellow_taxi_data['tpep_dropoff_datetime'], format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
yellow_taxi_data['trip_duration'] = (yellow_taxi_data['tpep_dropoff_datetime'] -
yellow_taxi_data['tpep_pickup_datetime']).dt.secondsyellow_taxi_data['PULocationID'].fillna(-1, inplace = True)
yellow_taxi_data['DOLocationID'].fillna(-1, inplace = True)
fhv_taxi_data['pickup_datetime'] = pd.to_datetime(fhv_taxi_data['pickup_datetime'], format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
fhv_taxi_data['dropoff_datetime'] = pd.to_datetime(fhv_taxi_data['dropoff_datetime'], format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
fhv_taxi_data['trip_duration'] = (fhv_taxi_data['dropoff_datetime'] - fhv_taxi_data['pickup_datetime']).dt.seconds
fhv_taxi_data['PULocationID'].fillna(-1, inplace = True)
fhv_taxi_data['DOLocationID'].fillna(-1, inplace = True)
We group the data at a daily level and plot the total duration:
green_date_wise_sum = green_taxi_data.groupby(green_taxi_data['lpep_pickup_datetime'].dt.date).sum()[2:-1]
yellow_date_wise_sum = yellow_taxi_data.groupby(yellow_taxi_data['tpep_pickup_datetime'].dt.date).sum()[4:-8]
fhv_date_wise_sum = fhv_taxi_data.groupby(fhv_taxi_data['pickup_datetime'].dt.date).sum()
plt.plot(green_date_wise_sum.index,green_date_wise_sum['trip_duration'])
plt.plot(yellow_date_wise_sum.index,yellow_date_wise_sum['trip_duration'])
plt.plot(fhv_date_wise_sum.index,fhv_date_wise_sum['trip_duration'])
plt.legend(['Green','Yellow','For-Hire'])
plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()
plt.title('Daily Duration in Seconds')
plt.xlabel('Date')
plt.ylabel('Travel Duration (in secs)')
Next, we group the data according to the PickUp Location to see, if some PickUp Locations have more demand or is it a horizontal line.
green_PU_wise_sum = green_taxi_data[green_taxi_data['PULocationID'].notna()].groupby(green_taxi_data['PULocationID']).sum()
yellow_PU_wise_sum = yellow_taxi_data[yellow_taxi_data['PULocationID'].notna()].groupby(yellow_taxi_data['PULocationID']).sum()
fhv_PU_wise_sum = fhv_taxi_data[fhv_taxi_data['PULocationID'].notna()].groupby(fhv_taxi_data['PULocationID']).sum()
plt.plot(green_PU_wise_sum.index[:-1],green_PU_wise_sum[:-1]['trip_duration'])
plt.plot(yellow_PU_wise_sum.index[:-1],yellow_PU_wise_sum[:-1]['trip_duration'])
plt.plot(fhv_PU_wise_sum.index[1:],fhv_PU_wise_sum[1:]['trip_duration'])
plt.legend(['Green','Yellow','For-Hire'])
plt.title('Trip Duration by PickUp Location')
plt.xlabel('PickUp Location')
plt.ylabel('Travel Duration (in secs)')
As you can see, in some locations yellow cabs are very prominent whereas in others for-hire cabs dominate. It is interesting to note that in very few locations green cabs are also the front runner. Since yellow dominate we will see a correlation between the yellow cab variables:
We can see that the total amount (or fare amount) has almost a zero correlation to trip distance (~0.0004) and trip duration (~0.004). Let us develop a machine learning model (linear regression) to predict the time for-hire cabs based on Pick Up and Drop Location IDs.
train_X = yellow_taxi_data[['PULocationID','DOLocationID']]
train_y = yellow_taxi_data[['trip_duration']]
model_y = yellow_taxi_data[['total_amount']]
test_X = fhv_taxi_data[['PULocationID','DOLocationID']]
test_y = fhv_taxi_data[['trip_duration']]
Here, we have used the yellow taxi data to train and the for-hire taxi data to predict:
reg = LinearRegression().fit(train_X, train_y)
print(reg.score(train_X, train_y))
print("coeff -" + str(reg.coef_))
print("intercept-"+str(reg.intercept_))
pred_y = reg.predict(test_X)
reg.score(test_X,test_y)
np.mean(pred_y-test_y)
You will get a mean absolute error of 1238.71 (secs), coefficients as [[ 6.82346983 -4.06077363]] and intercept as [754.75303061] for the train data. For the test data, the mean absolute error is 932.06 (secs). The mean difference between predicted and actual duration is -739.25 i.e. a model based on yellow taxis predicts almost a ~12 minute lesser travel duration.
One reason for the lower travel time in yellow cabs could be the pricing model, $0.35 per minute + $1.75 per mile for-hire and $0.50 per 1/5 mile or $0.50 per 60 seconds in slow traffic or when the vehicle is stopped for yellow cabs. Since you are charged throughout for the time in for-hire the charges are lower and therefore people may prefer them to wait or delay them, whereas in the case of yellow cabs you are only charged for the time when the vehicle is in slow traffic or stopped (and the price is higher because it also includes a vehicle cost).
Of course, the pricing model is only one of the reasons, the driver's efficiency, behavioral patterns, and other factors can also have a major impact. Thank you for reading this article. If you want to predict the prices or any other value for the for-hire cabs change ‘train_y’ to your preferred value (such as ‘model_y’) and you are good to go.
We have open-sourced the entire source code on GitHub. If you have any questions please reach out to [email protected]. ShortHills Tech can help you train your Machine Learning Models and arrive at important business decisions.
By: Apurv Sibal