A Dynamic Spatio-temporal Network with Self-attention for Multi-station Passenger Flow Prediction

Passenger flow prediction is vitally significant for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Most of the studies typically focus on the passenger flow prediction for an individual station, and only capture the temporal features without considering any spatial features. Constructing a passenger flow prediction model for multiple stations, or even a whole network, is more valuable for practical applications. Therefore, we develop a dynamic spatio-temporal network (DSTNet) with a self-attention (SA) mechanism for multi-station passenger flow prediction. A dynamic graph convolutional network (DGCN) is applied for the spatial feature extraction, and gated recurrent unit (GRU) is combined to learn the temporal features. SA is applied to further assign the weights for the extracted spatio-temporal features. The Experiment has been conducted on the passenger flow in the Xiamen bus rapid transit (BRT). The results demonstrate that the proposed DSTNet with SA (SA-DSTNet) outperforms the baselines in the multi-station passenger flow prediction task.