Spatial Meta Learning With Comprehensive Prior Knowledge Injection for Service Time Prediction

Intelligent logistics relies on accurately predicting the service time, which is a part of time cost in the last-mile delivery. However, service time prediction (STP) is non-trivial given complex delivery circumstances, location heterogeneity, and skewed observations in space, which are not well-handled by existing solutions. In our prior work, we treat STP at each location as a learning task to keep the location heterogeneity, propose a prior knowledge-enhanced meta-learning to tackle skewed observations, and introduce a Transformer-based representation module to encode complex delivery circumstances. Maintaining the design principles of prior work, in this extended paper, we propose MetaSTP⁺. In addition to fusing the prior knowledge after the meta-learning process, MetaSTP⁺ also injects the prior knowledge before and during the meta-learning process to better tackle skewed observations. More specifically, MetaSTP⁺ completes the support set of tasks with scarce samples from other tasks based on prior knowledge and is equipped with a prior knowledge-aware historical observation encoding module to achieve those purposes accordingly. Experiments show MetaSTP⁺ outperforms the best baseline by 11.2% and 8.4% on two real-world datasets. Finally, an intelligent waybill assignment system based on MetaSTP⁺ is deployed in JD Logistics.