Forecasting bus passenger flows by using a clustering-based support vector regression approach

As a significant component of the intelligent transportation system, forecasting bus passenger flows plays a key role in resource allocation, network planning, and frequency setting. However, it remains challenging to recognize high fluctuations, nonlinearity, and periodicity of bus passenger flows due to varied destinations and departure times. For this reason, a novel forecasting model named as affinity propagation-based support vector regression (AP-SVR) is proposed based on clustering and nonlinear simulation. For the addressed approach, a clustering algorithm is first used to generate clustering-based intervals. A support vector regression (SVR) is then exploited to forecast the passenger flow for each cluster, with the use of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for obtaining the optimized parameters. Finally, the prediction results of the SVR are rearranged by chronological order rearrangement. The proposed model is tested using real bus passenger data from a bus line over four months. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than other peer models in terms of absolute percentage error and mean absolute percentage error. It is recommended that the deterministic clustering technique with stable cluster results (AP) can improve the forecasting performance significantly.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Forecasting the All-Weather Short-Term Metro Passenger Flow Based on Seasonal and Nonlinear LSSVM

Accurate metro ridership prediction can guide passengers in efficiently selecting their departure time and simultaneously help traffic operators develop a passenger organization strategy. However, short-term passenger flow prediction needs to consider many factors, and the results of the existing models for short-term subway passenger flow forecasting are often unsatisfactory. Along this line, we propose a parallel architecture, called the seasonal and nonlinear least squares support vector machine (SN-LSSVM), to extract the periodicity and nonlinearity characteristics of passenger flow. Various forecasting models, including auto-regressive integrated moving average, long short-term memory network, and support vector machine, are employed for evaluating the performance of the proposed architecture. Moreover, we first applied the method to the Tiyu Xilu station which is the most crowded station in the Guangzhou metro. The results indicate that the proposed model can effectively make all-weather and year-round passenger flow predictions, thus contributing to the management of the station

Multi-Step Subway Passenger Flow Prediction under Large Events Using Website Data

An accurate and reliable forecasting method of the subway passenger flow provides the operators with more valuable reference to make decisions, especially in reducing energy consumption and controlling potential risks. However, due to the non-recurrence and inconsistency of large events (such as sports games, concerts or urban marathons), predicting passenger flow under large events has become a very challenging task. This paper proposes a method for extracting event-related information from websites and constructing a multi-step station-level passenger flow prediction model called DeepSPE (Deep Learning for Subway Passenger Flow Forecasting under Events). Experiments on the actual data set of the Beijing subway prove the superiority of the model and the effectiveness of website data in subway passenger flow forecasting under events

Benchmarking Travel Time and Demand Prediction Methods Using Large-scale Metro Smart Card Data

Urban mass transit systems generate large volumes of data via automated systems established for ticketing, signalling, and other operational processes. This study is motivated by the observation that despite the availability of sophisticated quantitative methods, most public transport operators are constrained in exploiting the information their datasets contain. This paper intends to address this gap in the context of real-time demand and travel time prediction with smart card data. We comparatively benchmark the predictive performance of four quantitative prediction methods: multivariate linear regression (MVLR) and semiparametric regression (SPR) widely used in the econometric literature, and random forest regression (RFR) and support vector machine regression (SVMR) from machine learning. We find that the SVMR and RFR methods are the most accurate in travel flow and travel time prediction, respectively. However, we also find that the SPR technique offers lower computation time at the expense of minor inefficiency in predictive power in comparison with the two machine learning methods