Adaptive Feature Fusion Networks for Origin-Destination Passenger Flow Prediction in Metro Systems

Accurately predicting Origin-Destination (OD) passenger flow can help metro service quality and efficiency. Existing works have focused on predicting incoming and outgoing flows for individual stations, while little attention was paid to OD prediction in metro systems. The challenges are that OD flows 1) have high temporal dynamics and complex spatial correlations, 2) are affected by external factors, and 3) have sparse and incomplete data slices. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Feature Fusion Network (AFFN) to a) adaptively fuse spatial dependencies from multiple knowledge-based graphs and even hidden correlations between stations and b) accurately capture the periodic patterns of passenger flows based on the auto-learned impact from external factors. To deal with the incompleteness and sparsity of OD matrices, we extend AFFN to multi-task AFFN to predict the inflow and outflow of each station as a side-task to further improve OD prediction accuracy. We conducted extensive experiments on two real-world metro trip datasets collected in Nanjing and Xi’an, China. Evaluation results show that our AFFN and multi-task AFFN outperform the state-of-the-art baseline techniques and AFFN variants in various accuracy metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of AFFN and each of its key components in OD prediction.