DEASeq2Seq: An attention based sequence to sequence model for short-term metro passenger flow prediction within decomposition-ensemble strategy

Short-term passenger flow prediction has practical significance for metro management and operation. However, the complex nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics make it challenging to detect evolution characteristics of passenger flow. To address this problem, a hybrid short-term metro passenger flow prediction model named decomposition ensemble attention sequence to sequence (DEASeq2Seq) is proposed in this paper. The proposed DEASeq2Seq includes three phases: decomposition, ensemble, and prediction. First, complete empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) is utilized to decompose the original passenger flow data into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residue. Second, recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) is performed to reconstruct the decomposed modes into a stochastic part, a deterministic part, and a trend part via determinism evaluation. Third, a Seq2Seq model with the attention mechanism is proposed to execute multistep prediction for short-term passenger flow and explore the influence mechanism of the reconstructed components on the prediction targets. The real dataset from Chengdu metro, China, is used to verify the proposed model. The experiment results show that the proposed DEASeq2Seq model outperforms the benchmark models. Further model interpretations are conducted to analyze the impacts of decomposition strategy, ensemble strategy, and attention mechanism.