Automatic Feature Engineering for Bus Passenger Flow Prediction Based on Modular Convolutional Neural Network

Deep Neural Network (DNN) has been applied in a wide range of fields due to its exceptional predictive power. In this paper, we explore how to use DNN to solve the large-scale bus passenger flow prediction problem. Currently, most existing methods designed for the passenger flow prediction problem are based on a single view, which is insufficient to capture the dynamics in passenger flow fluctuation. Thus, we analyze the passenger flow from scopes on both macroscopic and microscopic levels, in order to take full advantage of the information from a variety of views. To better understand the role of different views, decision-tree-based models are used in modeling and predicting passenger flow. The defects and key features of decision-tree-based models are then analyzed. The results of the analysis can assist the architecture design of the deep learning network. Inspired by the feature engineering of decision-tree-based models, a modular convolutional neural network is designed, which contains automatic feature extraction block, feature importance block, fully-connected block, and data fusion block. The proposed model is evaluated on the city-wide public transport datasets in Nanjing, China, involving 1,091 bus lines in total. The experiment results demonstrate the outstanding performance of the proposed method in real situations.