Predicting Passenger Flow Using Graph Neural Networks with Scheduled Sampling on Bus Networks

Predicting short-term passenger flows in bus networks is crucial to improving the overall performance of such systems and increasing their attractiveness. This study develops a graph neural network-based framework for multi-step passenger flow prediction specifically designed for bus networks to capture their unique characteristics. We propose the Multi-step Multi-component Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (Multi-GCN-LSTM) model, which uses 1) a proximity matrix in addition to an adjacency matrix to consider the effects of vehicular traffic and link-level distances; 2) Scheduled Sampling for multi-step prediction, which prevents error propagation across prediction steps; and 3) a novel fusion mechanism for considering time-varying spatial and temporal correlations among passenger flow data based on recent, daily, and weekly travel patterns. This model is validated using real-world data collected from the Laval bus network. Also, benchmarking the established model against state-of-the-art baselines indicated its competency.