Taxi-demand forecasting and hotspot prediction can be critical in reducing response times and designing a cost effective online taxi-booking model. Taxi demand in a region can be predicted by considering the past demand accumulated in that region over a span of time. However, other covariates-like neighborhood influence, sociodemographic parameters, and point-of-interest data-may also influence the spatiotemporal variation of demand. To study the effects of these covariates, in this paper, we propose three models that consider different covariates in order to select a set of independent variables. These models predict taxi demand in spatial units for a given temporal resolution using linear and ensemble regression. We eventually combine the characteristics (covariates) of each of these models to propose a robust forecasting framework which we call the combined covariates model (CCM). Experimental results show that the CCM performs better than the other models proposed in this paper.