How spatial features affect urban rail transit prediction accuracy: a deep learning based passenger flow prediction method

Urban rail transit is an integral part of public transit, and has been extensive built in China. Previous studies have proved that the spatial features are closely related to rail transit ridership, considering a fundamental role of short-term passenger flow forecast in the urban rail operation, it is meaningful to explore how these factors affect the prediction accuracy. This study aims to find a way to improve prediction accuracy by considering spatial features of stations based on deep learning. Therefore, a CNN-LSTM model capturing the spatial and temporal features was applied and Suzhou (China) was choosing as a case study to explore the influence of three spatial features, namely relative position, location, and land use, on the prediction accuracy. The predict model used can extract spatiotemporal features and accurately predict the citywide stations, and the results show that, for the relative position, the inbound and outbound flow prediction errors of transfer stations and middle stations are the lowest, respectively. As for locational features, the more distant the station is from the city center, the more accurate the results are. For stations where land use is dominated by work and living services, the predictions are more accurate. The error rate is higher for stations whose services are mainly tourism, transportation, and leisure services. This study’s results can help operators predict the short-term passenger flow of target stations based on different demands and optimize their services on this basis.