# A Spatio-Temporal Schedule-Based Neural Network for Urban Taxi Waiting Time Prediction
## 3 Materials and Methods  
### Urban Residents' Temporal Behavior  
As previously mentioned, taxis play an important role in urban public transportation. Urban residents' travel behaviors are directly associated with the taxis' running laws in the city [24]. Such patterns generally reflect urban residents' life, working habits, and studies among many activity categories. They are influenced by many factors that reflect human, urban, and socio-economical environments. Different human categories act in the city from state civil servants, business and administrative professionals, and students, retired people, and other professional categories [25; 26]. Among many factors that impact taxi waiting times, residents' working and leisure habits, and a distinction between different functional areas in the city constitute key factors. Moreover, the differences between working days, weekends and holidays are major criteria to consider [5; 6]. All these parameters are considered by our neural network modelling framework, as well as functional and spatial differences in people's behavior in the city. This leads us to setup different temporal interval divisions for holidays and working days to reflect differences in people's behavior.  
Without the loss of generality, we assume a temporal representation of residents' behaviors in the city at the macro level as follows for either weekend or holidays:  
* Between 05:00 to 08:59, in the early morning, most of the residents are resting at home while only a small number of them are active;
* From 09:00 to 13:59, when it comes to the morning to early afternoon rush, some of the residents are going out and performing some essential activities while others are staying at home;
* Between 14:00 and 17:59, it is afternoon peak, and residents generally have a need for some leisure activities such as shopping and dining;
* From 18:00 to 23:59, it is evening peak, including evening meals and travels back to home activities;
* From 24:00 to 04:59, people are generally sleeping at night peak.  
Among many patterns that appear, students and working people generally have the relatively close distribution of activity patterns for a usual weekday [27]. During working days, and the night is divided into two parts, the first part is from 23:00 to 03:59, which means most of the residents are at their bedtime. The latter half of the night is from 04:00 to 06:59, called end of night. At the same time, some individual operators, such as breakfast shop operators, sanitation workers, and so on, have arrived at the time of business. Between 07:00 and 08:59, it is the first rush of urban residents' daily travel, called the morning rush. In the meantime, both students and workers need to go to school and work. From 09:00 to 11:59, it is study time for students in school and office time for office workers in the company, and this time it is also working time for other occupations. Residents' activities tend to be stable in that temporal period, which is the first flat peak period of urban residents' daily work in a day. Then here comes the lunch break, which is from 12:00 to 14:29, people usually go for lunch or have a short time to go home. After that, between 14:30 and 17:30, it is afternoon time for school and work. Between 17:31 and 20:59, the second rush of the day is called the evening rush, the number of outdoor activities such as students leaving school, office workers returning home from work or shopping becomes larger. From 21:00 to 22:59, residents usually return home to rest after evening activities, ushering in the second small rush of the day, called late evening.