A Bus Passenger Flow Prediction Model Fused with Point-of-Interest Data Based on Extreme Gradient Boosting

Abstract

Bus operation scheduling is closely related to passenger flow. Accurate bus passenger flow prediction can help improve urban bus planning and service quality and reduce the cost of bus operation. Using machine learning algorithms to find the rules of urban bus passenger flow has become one of the research hotspots in the field of public transportation, especially with the rise of big data technology. Bus IC card data are an important data resource and are more valuable to passenger flow prediction in comparison with manual survey data. Aiming at the balance between efficiency and accuracy of passenger flow prediction for multiple lines, we propose a novel passenger flow prediction model based on the point-of-interest (POI) data and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), called PFP-XPOI. Firstly, we collected POI data around bus stops based on the Amap Web service application interface. Secondly, three dimensions were considered for building the model. Finally, the XGBoost algorithm was chosen to train the model for each bus line. Results show that the model has higher prediction accuracy through comparison with other models, and thus this method can be used for short-term passenger flow forecasting using bus IC cards. It plays a very important role in providing decision basis for more refined bus operation management.