Multitype Origin-Destination (OD) Passenger Flow Prediction for Urban Rail Transit: A Deep Learning Clustering First Predicting Second Integrated Framework

Accurately predicting origin-destination (OD) passenger flows serves as the basis for implementing efficient plans, including line planning and timetabling. However, due to the complexity and variety of OD passenger flows types, general prediction models have difficulty in capturing the features of different OD passenger flows, which in turn leads to poor prediction performance. To address this issue, we propose an integrated framework that combines clustering and prediction methods. First, an unsupervised deep learning model is devised to automatically cluster OD flow types by capturing shape characteristics. Second, three types of features are created to enhance training efficiency, including static features, time-dependent observed features, and time-dependent known features. Based on the clustering of OD passenger flow, a weighted adaptive passenger flow prediction model is developed. The study employs a temporal fusion transformers model to enable multitype OD passenger flow prediction. In the numerical experiments, the model was applied to the urban rail transit in South China, and the model clustered 15,168 OD pairs into 4 types for prediction. The findings show that this approach enhanced the prediction accuracy by 2.0%–9.6% compared to the LSTM model and by 1.6%–4.3% compared to the Graph WaveNet. Moreover, the model can accurately assess the various features for diverse types of OD flows.