Did You Enjoy the Ride: Understanding Passenger Experience via Heterogeneous Network Embedding

Online taxicab platforms like DiDi and Uber have impacted hundreds of millions of users on their choices of traveling, but how do users feel about the ride-sharing services, and how to improve their experience? While current ride-sharing services have collected massive travel data, it remains challenging to develop data-driven techniques for modeling and predicting user ride experience. In this work, we aim to accurately predict passenger satisfaction over their rides and understand the key factors that lead to good/bad experiences. Based on in-depth analysis of large-scale travel data from a popular taxicab platform in China, we develop PHINE (Pattern-aware Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding) for data-driven user experience modeling. Our PHINE framework is novel in that it is composed of spatial-temporal node binding and grouping for addressing the inherent data variation, and pattern preservation based joint training for modeling the interactions among drivers, passengers, locations, and time. Extensive experiments on 12 realworld travel datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PHINE over strong baseline methods. We have deployed PHINE in the DiDi Big Data Center, delivering high-quality predictions for passenger satisfaction on a daily basis.