Short-Term Subway Passenger Flow Prediction Based on Time Series Adaptive Decomposition and Multi-Model Combination (IVMD-SE-MSSA)

Abstract

The accurate forecasting of short-term subway passenger flow is beneficial for promoting operational efficiency and passenger satisfaction. However, the nonlinearity and nonstationarity of passenger flow time series bring challenges to short-term passenger flow prediction. To solve this challenge, a prediction model based on improved variational mode decomposition (IVMD) and multi-model combination is proposed. Firstly, the mixed-strategy improved sparrow search algorithm (MSSA) is used to adaptively determine the parameters of the VMD with envelope entropy as the fitness value. Then, IVMD is applied to decompose the original passenger flow time series into several sub-series adaptively. Meanwhile, the sample entropy is utilized to divide the sub-series into high-frequency and low-frequency components, and different models are established to predict the sub-series with different frequencies. Finally, the MSSA is employed to determine the weight coefficients of each sub-series to combine the prediction results of the sub-series and get the final passenger flow prediction results. To verify the prediction performance of the established model, passenger flow datasets from four different types of Nanning Metro stations were taken as examples for carrying out experiments. The experimental results showed that: (a) The proposed hybrid model for short-term passenger flow prediction is superior to several baseline models in terms of both prediction accuracy and versatility. (b) The proposed hybrid model is excellent in multi-step prediction. Taking station 1 as an example, the MAEs of the proposed model are 3.677, 5.7697, and 8.1881, respectively, which can provide technical support for subway operations management.