Uber
Assembly Line
DeepETA: How Uber Predicts Arrival Times Using Deep Learning
For several years, Uber used gradient-boosted decision tree ensembles to refine ETA predictions. The ETA model and its training dataset grew steadily larger with each release. To keep pace with this growth, Uber’s Apache Spark™ team contributed upstream improvements [1, 2] to XGBoost to allow the model to grow ever deeper, making it one of the largest and deepest XGBoost ensembles in the world at that time. Eventually, we reached a point where increasing the dataset and model size using XGBoost became untenable. To continue scaling the model and improving accuracy, we decided to explore deep learning because of the relative ease of scaling to large datasets using data-parallel SGD.