Travel pattern recognition of urban rail passengers based on spatiotemporal sequence similarity

Understanding passenger travel patterns is helpful for the allocation of passenger resources in urban rail transit. Based on rail transit smart card data, this paper proposes a method to identify travel patterns by modeling individual spatiotemporal sequences. First, all the stations visited by individual passengers are extracted, and the similarity of the stations is calculated by the frequency of inter-station travel, the distance between stations and the activity duration of the stations. The main spatial activity area of the individual is divided using a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Then, the spatiotemporal sequence is inferred based on the individual's travel order. The sequence is a set of discrete values that characterize the spatiotemporal state. PCA-KL and K-Means++ are used to extract the similarity sequence structure to identify the passenger travel pattern. Finally, the rail transit smart card data of Xi'an in a certain month is taken as an example to identify its passenger travel pattern. The results show that complex passenger flow has 5 travel modes, of which 3 typical modes are commuting travel in a macro sense, accounting for 79% of the passenger flow. It can be seen that the pattern recognition based on the similarity of individual spatiotemporal sequences in this paper fully reflects the particularity and versatility of the research method, and is highly operational for different cities.