Short-Term Origin-Destination Forecasting in Urban Rail Transit Based on Attraction Degree

Origin-destination (OD) forecasting is a difficult task in urban rail transit because many random factors can influence outcomes such as numerous OD pairs with few or even no flows. Therefore, treating all OD pairs equally, which is the method adopted by all existing studies, may not only increase model complexity and computation, but also negatively influence forecasting results. Therefore, in this study, we propose an indicator called OD attraction degree (ODAD) to address this problem in the field of OD forecasting. First, we introduce the ODAD indicator and five ODAD levels to describe the attraction between OD pairs. Based on the ODAD, an OD matrix pre-processing method is presented to prepare data for the LSTM model. Second, we use the mature long short-term memory (LSTM) network model to examine the effects of the introduction of ODAD. The LSTM model's advantage of dealing with variable-length sequences by leveraging the masking layer is creatively utilized. Finally, nine cases under different time granularities and different ODAD levels are thoroughly studied to explore their optimal combination. Based on this analysis, we recommend a time granularity of 30 min and an ODAD level of “Low” for actual subway operation. In this case, the root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and weighted mean absolute percentage error are 2.31%, 0.66%, and 27.28%, respectively, for a network of nearly 300 subway stations. The introduction of ODAD can provide critical insights for subway operators to conduct short-term OD forecasting.