Hybrid models of subway passenger flow prediction based on convolutional neural network

Accurate and stable short‐term passenger flow prediction is an indispensable part of current intelligent transportation systems. This paper proposes two deep learning prediction models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short‐term memory neural network (LSTM). Combining the CNN characteristics and the LSTM, the ConvXD‐LSTM extracts passenger flow features through CNN and then inputs the time series into the LSTM. The ConvLSTM converts the weight calculation of the LSTM into convolution operation to realize short‐term passenger flow prediction. Fuzhou Metro Line 1 passenger flow data was used for verification. The models were used to predict the passenger flow of subway stations and cross‐sections and compared with the traditional prediction models. In terms of prediction accuracy, ConvLSTM has the highest accuracy, followed by ConvXD‐LSTM. In terms of running time, ConvXD is the fastest and LSTM takes the longest. ConvXD‐LSTM and ConvLSTM are in the middle of the two models, achieving a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. Compared with ConvXD‐LSTM, ConvLSTM has a relatively simple network structure, which reduces the computational burden and improves the prediction accuracy.