A Joint Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning Model for Drivers' Behavioral Prediction

Users' behavioral predictions are crucially important for many domains including major e-commerce companies, ride-hailing platforms, social networking, and education. The success of such prediction strongly depends on the development of representation learning that can effectively model the dynamic evolution of user's behavior. This paper aims to develop a joint framework of combining inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with deep learning (DL) regression model, called IRL-DL, to predict drivers' future behavior in ride-hailing platforms. Specifically, we formulate the dynamic evolution of each driver as a sequential decision-making problem and then employ IRL as representation learning to learn the preference vector of each driver. Then, we integrate drivers' preference vector with their static features (e.g., age, gender) and other attributes to build a regression model (e.g., LTSM-neural network) to predict drivers' future behavior. We use an extensive driver data set obtained from a ride-sharing platform to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our IRL-DL framework, and results show that our IRL-DL framework can achieve consistent and remarkable improvements over models without drivers' preference vectors.