RideBench: A Large-Scale Exogenous-Aware Benchmark for Ride-Hailing Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

We release Ride-Hailing, a large-scale ride-hailing time series dataset synthesized from DiDi's marketplace data across 200 spatial areas. Ride-Hailing spans four consecutive years at half-hourly granularity and covers three representative exogenous scenarios: Weather Disturbance, Holiday Effect, and Large-scale Event Impact. Built upon Ride-Hailing, we introduce RideBench, a comprehensive benchmark for exogenous-aware ride-hailing forecasting, covering both regular week-ahead forecasting and long-horizon 8-week-ahead forecasting with up to 2,688 prediction steps. RideBench evaluates over 30 representative forecasting methods, including endogenous-only models, exogenous-aware models, and time series foundation models. Our results show that future-known exogenous variables provide clear benefits in regular week-ahead forecasting, especially under weather, holiday, and large-scale event (e.g., major sporting events and concerts) scenarios. However, current exogenous-aware models still struggle to fully capture disturbance-induced pattern changes under complex external contexts. For long-horizon forecasting, existing models cannot simultaneously achieve low pointwise errors, accurate broad trends, and reliable near-term forecasts. These findings reveal a clear mismatch between existing forecasting models and real-world ride-hailing requirements, highlighting the need for models that can better exploit future-known exogenous information, scale across heterogeneous areas, and support long-horizon planning. By introducing Ride-Hailing and RideBench, we aim to encourage the community to study these practical challenges in real-world ride-hailing forecasting.