Forecasting Daily and Weekly Passenger Demand for Urban Rail Transit Stations Based on a Time Series Model Approach

Abstract

Forecasting daily and weekly passenger demand is a key fundamental process used by existing urban rail transit (URT) station authorities to diagnose operational problems and make decisions about train schedule patterns to improve operational efficiency, increase revenue management, and improve driving safety. The accuracy of the forecast results will directly affect the operation planning of urban rail transit (URT). Therefore, based on the collected inbound historical passenger data, this study used the Box–Jenkins time series with the Facebook Prophet algorithm to analyze the characteristics of urban rail transit passenger demand and achieved better computational forecasting performance accuracy. After analyzing the periodicity, correlation, and stationarity, different time series models were constructed. The Akaike information criteria (AIC), Bayesian information criteria (BIC), mean squared error (MSE), and root mean squared error (RMSE) were used to evaluate the adequacy of the best forecast model from among several tested candidates’ models for the Box–Jenkins. The parameters of the daily and weekly models were estimated using statistical software. The experimental results of this study are of both theoretical and practical significance to the urban rail transit (URT) station authorities for an effective station planning system. The forecasting results signify that the SARIMA (5, 1, 3) (1, 0, 0)24 model performs better and is more stable in forecasting the daily passenger demand, and the ARMA (2, 1) model performs better in forecasting the weekly passenger demand. When comparing the SARIMA and ARMA models with the Facebook Prophet, results show that the Facebook Prophet model is superior to the SARIMA model for the daily time series, and the ARMA model is superior to the Facebook Prophet model for the weekly time series.