Parallel framework of a multi-graph convolutional network and gated recurrent unit for spatial–temporal metro passenger flow prediction

Metro passenger flow prediction is a critical problem in metro transport systems. However, recent studies have either overlooked spatial information on the metro network or primarily focused on modeling spatial dependencies using only the physical topology. To achieve accurate metro passenger flow (inflow and outflow at each station of a network) prediction, this study proposes a joint prediction model that combines the multi-graph convolution network and the gated recurrent unit (GRU). In addition to exploring location topology relationships, the proposed model selects two non-Euclidean spatial dependencies in metro passenger flow prediction to design essential graph elements as part of the stacked spatial block. Three spatial relationships (adjacency, similarity, and correlation) are integrated in parallel with the GRU network. The metro passenger flow prediction framework ASC-GRU (adjacency, similarity, correlation, and gated recurrent unit) is designed to mitigate the distortion of results during the capturing of passenger flow spatial–temporal features. Finally, ASC-GRU is tested using two datasets from the Hangzhou and Shanghai metro networks in China, and the error metrics of different models are compared and analyzed to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of ASC-GRU. The test results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other baseline models in passenger flow prediction over long time intervals and large networks. In particular, compared with the best performance of the baselines, the average reduction is around 3%, 12% and 13% in metrics of MAPE, MAE and RMSE, respectively.