Short-term origin-destination demand prediction in urban rail transit systems: A channel-wise attentive split-convolutional neural network method

Authors

Jinlei Zhang
Hongshu Che
Feng Chen
Wei Ma
Zhengbing He

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2021

Subject Area

place - urban, place - asia, mode - rail, mode - subway/metro, technology - intelligent transport systems, ridership - forecasting, ridership - demand

Keywords

Deep learning, Urban rail transit, Short-term origin-destination prediction, Channel-wise attention, Split CNN

Abstract

Short-term origin–destination (OD) flow prediction in urban rail transit (URT) plays a crucial role in smart and real-time URT operation and management. Different from other short-term traffic forecasting methods, the short-term OD flow prediction possesses three unique characteristics: (1) data availability: real-time OD flow is not available during the prediction; (2) data dimensionality: the dimension of the OD flow is much higher than the cardinality of transportation networks; (3) data sparsity: URT OD flow is spatiotemporally sparse. There is a great need to develop novel OD flow forecasting method that explicitly considers the unique characteristics of the URT system. To this end, a channel-wise attentive split–convolutional neural network (CAS-CNN) is proposed. The proposed model consists of many novel components such as the channel-wise attention mechanism and split CNN. In particular, an inflow/outflow-gated mechanism is innovatively introduced to address the data availability issue. We further originally propose a masked loss function to solve the data dimensionality and data sparsity issues. The model interpretability is also discussed in detail. The CAS–CNN model is tested on two large-scale real-world datasets from Beijing Subway, and it outperforms the rest of benchmarking methods. The proposed model contributes to the development of short-term OD flow prediction, and it also lays the foundations of real-time URT operation and management.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part C Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

Recommended Citation

Zhang, J., Che, H., Chen, F., Ma, W., & He, Z. (2021). Short-term origin-destination demand prediction in urban rail transit systems: A channel-wise attentive split-convolutional neural network method. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Vol. 124, 102928.