Due to the environmental impact of fossil fuels and high variability in their prices, there is rising interest in adopting electric vehicles (EVs) by both individuals and governments. Despite the advances in vehicle efficiency and battery capacity, a key hurdle is the inherent interdependence between EV adoption and charging station deployment–EV adoption (and hence, charging demand) increases with the availability of charging stations (operated by service providers) and vice versa. Thus, effective placement of charging stations plays a key role in EV adoption. In the placement problem, given a set of candidate sites, an optimal subset needs to be selected with respect to the concerns of both (a) the charging station service provider, such as the demand at the candidate sites and the budget for deployment, and (b) the EV user, such as charging station reachability and short waiting times at the station. This work addresses these concerns, making the following three novel contributions: (i) a supervised multi-view learning framework using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) for demand prediction at candidate sites, using multiple datasets such as points of interest information, traffic density, and the historical usage at existing charging stations; (ii) a “mixed-packing-and-covering” optimization framework that models competing concerns of the service provider and EV users, which is also extended to optimize government grant allocation to multiple service providers; (iii) an iterative heuristic to solve these problems by alternately invoking knapsack and set cover algorithms. The performance of the demand prediction model and the placement optimization heuristic are evaluated using real world data. In most cases, and especially when budget is scarce, our heuristic achieves an improvement of 10-20 over a naive heuristic, both in finding feasible solutions and maximizing demand.
Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a classical method for seeking correlations between two multivariate data sets. During the last ten years, it has received more and more attention in the machine learning community in the form of novel computational formulations and a plethora of applications. We review recent developments in Bayesian models and inference methods for CCA which are attractive for their potential in hierarchical extensions and for coping with the combination of large dimensionalities and small sample sizes. The existing methods have not been particularly successful in fulfilling the promise yet; we introduce a novel efficient solution that imposes group-wise sparsity to estimate the posterior of an extended model which not only extracts the statistical dependencies (correlations) between data sets but also decomposes the data into shared and data set-specific components. In statistics literature the model is known as inter-battery factor analysis (IBFA), for which we now provide a Bayesian treatment. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is a useful technique for modeling dependencies between two (or more) sets of variables. Building upon the recently suggested probabilistic interpretation of CCA, we propose a nonparametric, fully Bayesian framework that can automatically select the number of correlation components, and effectively capture the sparsity underlying the projections. In addition, given (partially) labeled data, our algorithm can also be used as a (semi)supervised dimensionality reduction technique, and can be applied to learn useful predictive features in the context of learning a set of related tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach for both CCA as a stand-alone problem, and when applied to multi-label prediction. Electric mobility is considered to be an essential building block of a sustainable transportation paradigm. Particularly for the urban metropolis of the 21st century electric vehicles embody a promise of decreased air pollution and increased quality of living. However, city planners need to muster enormous investments into urban charging infrastructure in advance. We develop a decision support system to help city planners use these funds more efficiently and place charging infrastructure where it is truly needed. We construct a regression model to determine factors that influence the utilization of charge points in Amsterdam, one of the most "electrified" cities in the world. We include data on more than 50,000 points of interest, for instance shopping malls and museums, as well as charging data from 273 charging points with 427 individual outlets in the city of Amsterdam. From these influences we derive a decision support system that places charge points where they are expected to experience the highest utilization. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is a well-known technique for finding the correlations between two sets of multidimensional variables. It projects both sets of variables onto a lower-dimensional space in which they are maximally correlated. CCA is commonly applied for supervised dimensionality reduction in which the two sets of variables are derived from the data and the class labels, respectively. It is well-known that CCA can be formulated as a least-squares problem in the binary class case. However, the extension to the more general setting remains unclear. In this paper, we show that under a mild condition which tends to hold for high-dimensional data, CCA in the multilabel case can be formulated as a least-squares problem. Based on this equivalence relationship, efficient algorithms for solving least-squares problems can be applied to scale CCA to very large data sets. In addition, we propose several CCA extensions, including the sparse CCA formulation based on the 1-norm regularization. We further extend the least-squares formulation to partial least squares. In addition, we show that the CCA projection for one set of variables is independent of the regularization on the other set of multidimensional variables, providing new insights on the effect of regularization on CCA. We have conducted experiments using benchmark data sets. Experiments on multilabel data sets confirm the established equivalence relationships. Results also demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed CCA extensions. Access to electric vehicle (EV) charging stations will affect EV adoption rates, use decisions, electrified mile shares, petroleum demand, and power consumption across times of day. Parking information from more than 30,000 records of personal trips in the Puget Sound, Washington, Regional Council's 2006 Household Activity Survey is used to determine public (nonresidential) parking locations and durations. Regression equations predict parking demand variables (i.e., total vehicle hours per zone or neighborhood and parked time per vehicle trip) as a function of site accessibility, local job and population density, trip attributes, and other variables available in most regions and travel surveys. Several of these variables are key inputs to a mixed-integer programming problem developed to determine optimal location assignments for EV charging stations. The algorithm minimizes EV users' costs for station access while penalizing unmet demand. This useful specification is used to determine the top locations fo...