Generating Time-Series Data Using Generative Adversarial Networks for Mobility Demand Prediction

The increasing penetration rate of electric kickboard vehicles has been popularized and promoted primarily because of its clean and efficient features.Electric kickboards are gradually growing in popularity in tourist and education-centric localities.In the upcoming arrival of electric kickboard vehicles,deploying a customer rental service is essential.Due to its freefloating nature,the shared electric kickboard is a common and practical means of transportation.Relocation plans for shared electric kickboards are required to increase the quality of service,and forecasting demand for their use in a specific region is crucial.Predicting demand accurately with small data is troublesome.Extensive data is necessary for training machine learning algorithms for effective prediction.Data generation is a method for expanding the amount of data that will be further accessible for training.In this work,we proposed a model that takes time-series customers’electric kickboard demand data as input,pre-processes it,and generates synthetic data according to the original data distribution using generative adversarial networks(GAN).The electric kickboard mobility demand prediction error was reduced when we combined synthetic data with the original data.We proposed Tabular-GAN-Modified-WGAN-GP for generating synthetic data for better prediction results.We modified The Wasserstein GAN-gradient penalty(GP)with the RMSprop optimizer and then employed Spectral Normalization(SN)to improve training stability and faster convergence.Finally,we applied a regression-based blending ensemble technique that can help us to improve performance of demand prediction.We used various evaluation criteria and visual representations to compare our proposed model’s performance.Synthetic data generated by our suggested GAN model is also evaluated.The TGAN-Modified-WGAN-GP model mitigates the overfitting and mode collapse problem,and it also converges faster than previous GAN models for synthetic data creation.The presented model’s performance is compared to existing ensemble and baseline models.The experimental findings imply that combining synthetic and actual data can significantly reduce prediction error rates in the mean absolute percentage error(MAPE)of 4.476 and increase prediction accuracy.

Generating Synthetic Data to Reduce Prediction Error of Energy Consumption

Renewable and nonrenewable energy sources are widely incorporated for solar and wind energy that produces electricity without increasing carbon dioxide emissions.Energy industries worldwide are trying hard to predict future energy consumption that could eliminate over or under contracting energy resources and unnecessary financing.Machine learning techniques for predicting energy are the trending solution to overcome the challenges faced by energy companies.The basic need for machine learning algorithms to be trained for accurate prediction requires a considerable amount of data.Another critical factor is balancing the data for enhanced prediction.Data Augmentation is a technique used for increasing the data available for training.Synthetic data are the generation of new data which can be trained to improve the accuracy of prediction models.In this paper,we propose a model that takes time series energy consumption data as input,pre-processes the data,and then uses multiple augmentation techniques and generative adversarial networks to generate synthetic data which when combined with the original data,reduces energy consumption prediction error.We propose TGAN-skip-Improved-WGAN-GP to generate synthetic energy consumption time series tabular data.We modify TGANwith skip connections,then improveWGANGPby defining a consistency term,and finally use the architecture of improved WGAN-GP for training TGAN-skip.We used various evaluation metrics and visual representation to compare the performance of our proposed model.We also measured prediction accuracy along with mean and maximum error generated while predicting with different variations of augmented and synthetic data with original data.The mode collapse problemcould be handled by TGAN-skip-Improved-WGAN-GP model and it also converged faster than existing GAN models for synthetic data generation.The experiment result shows that our proposed technique of combining synthetic data with original data could significantly reduce the prediction error rate and increase the prediction accuracy of energy consumption.