gandhar/sp-gotham

Gotham City Cabs

Problem Setup

It is around the year 2034 in the city of Gotham, and the last time Batman got into a fight with the Joker, the Batmobile (Batman’s high-tech car) was seriously damaged. Apparently, it would take his butler, Alfred, a while to fix the car and during that time Batman needs to use a cab to save people! Alfred needs your help to come up with a good prediction of the taxi trip duration between multiple points of the Gotham city. If he can make such predictions, then that significantly helps with Batman’s missions. Lucius (Batman’s tech support staff) has been able to pull out a rich dataset of the recorded taxi durations between various parts of the city and is sharing that with you for your modeling purposes.

The input features of the aforementioned data file are:

• pickupdatetime:a variable containing a date and a time specifying the date and the time the taxi picked of a passenger. For instance, you may observe a pickupdatetime of “6/14/2034 3:00:00 AM”, which indicates the time the taxi picked up the passenger.
• NumberOfPassengers: The number of passengers loaded to the cab. Note that all passengers are loaded together and are dropped off together. So in case you see 5 people loaded, it means they all got to the cab together and all got off at the destination.
• pickupx:This is a variable that represents the x coordinate of the location the taxi picked up the passenger.
• pickupy:This is a variable that represents the y coordinate of the location the taxi picked up the passenger.
• dropoffx:This is a variable that represents the x coordinate of the location the taxi dropped off the passenger.
• dropoffy:This is a variable that represents the y coordinate of the location the taxi dropped off the passenger.

The response variable is:

• duration: which is the duration of the trip in seconds.