Engineering Extreme Event Forecasting at Uber with Recurrent Neural Networks

At Uber, event forecasting enables us to future-proof our services based on anticipated user demand. The goal is to accurately predict where, when, and how many ride requests Uber will receive at any given time. Extreme events--peak travel times such as holidays, concerts, inclement weather, and sporting events--only heighten the importance of forecasting for operations planning. Calculating demand time series forecasting during extreme events is a critical component of anomaly detection, optimal resource allocation, and budgeting. Although extreme event forecasting is a crucial piece of Uber operations, data sparsity makes accurate prediction challenging.