Short-Time Inbound Passenger Flow Prediction of Urban Rail Transit Based on STL-HEOA-BiLSTM

Accurate short-time passenger volume prediction can guarantee the efficient scheduling command of urban rail transit. However, the short-time passenger flow of rail transit has the characteristics of nonlinearity and high randomness. In order to improve the prediction accuracy of short-time passenger volume, the Seasonal-Trend decomposition using Loess (STL) method and Human Evolutionary Optimization Algorithm (HEOA) is employed to optimize the bi-directional long short-term memory neural network (BiLSTM). Thus, a combined STL-HEOA-BiLSTM prediction model is proposed. Firstly, the inbound passenger volume along the urban rail transit is classified according to the Pearson correlation number. Secondly, the STL algorithm decomposes different types of short-time passenger flow data into Trend component (Tt), Seasonal component (St) and Residual component (Rt). Thirdly, the HEOA optimizes the various types of hyper-parameters of the BiLSTM model. Finally, the optimized BiLSTM model predicts Tt, St and Rt individually, and the final prediction value is obtained based on the combination of the three predictions. Three evaluation metrics are used to assess the results and quantify the effectiveness of the combined model. The example analysis shows that the prediction accuracy of the combined STL-HEOA-BiLSTM model surpasses that of the other six common and combined models in forecasting short-duration passenger flow. This experimental result shows the effectiveness, accuracy and applicability of the STL-HEOA-BiLSTM model proposed in this paper. It is demonstrated that the proposed model has a reference value for urban rail transit operators. © 2024, International Association of Engineers. All rights reserved.