Combining knowledge graph into metro passenger flow prediction: A split-attention relational graph convolutional network

Abstract

With the rapid development of intelligent operation and management in metro systems, accurate network-scale passenger flow prediction has become an essential component in real-time metro management. Although numerous novel methods have been applied in this field, critical barriers still exist in integrating travel behaviors and comprehensive spatiotemporal dependencies into prediction. This study constructs the metro system as a knowledge graph and proposes a split-attention relational graph convolutional network (SARGCN) to address these challenges. Breaking the limitations of physical metro networks, we develop a metro topological graph construction method based on the historical origin–destination (OD) matrix to involve travel behaviors. Then, we design a metro knowledge graph construction method to incorporate land-use features. To adapt prior knowledge of metro systems, we subsequently propose the SARGCN model for network-scale metro passenger flow prediction. This model integrates the relational graph convolutional network (R-GCN), split-attention mechanism, and long short-term memory (LSTM) to explore the spatiotemporal correlations and dependence between passenger inflow and outflow. According to the model validation conducted on the metro systems in Shenzhen and Hangzhou, China, the SARGCN model outperforms the advanced baselines. Furthermore, quantitative experiments also reveal the effectiveness of its component and the constructed metro knowledge graph.