Large-Scale Origin–Destination Prediction for Urban Rail Transit Network Based on Graph Convolutional Neural Network

Due to data sparsity, insufficient spatial relationships, and the complex spatial and temporal characteristics of passenger flow, it is very challenging to achieve a high prediction accuracy on Origin–Destination (OD) in a large urban rail transit network. This paper proposes a two-stage prediction network GCN-GRU, using a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) with a Gated Recursive Unit (GRU). The GCN can obtain the adjacency relationship between different stations by selecting the adjacent neighborhoods and interacting neighborhoods of a station and capturing the spatial characteristics of the OD passenger flow. Then, an advanced weighted aggregator is employed to gather important information from the two above-mentioned types of neighborhoods to capture the spatial relationship of the network OD passenger flow and to perceive the sparsity and range of the OD data. On the other hand, the GRU can extract the temporal relationship, such as periodicity and other time-varying trends. The effectiveness of GCN-GRU is tested with a real-world urban rail transit dataset. The experimental results show that whether it is the OD passenger flow matrix of each period (one hour) on weekdays and weekends or the single-pair OD passenger flow between stations, the proposed GCN-GRU models perform better than the benchmark models. This study provides an important theoretical basis and practical applications for operators, thus promoting the sustainable development of urban rail transit systems.