Metro Passenger Flow Prediction via Dynamic Hypergraph Convolution Networks

Metro passenger flow prediction is a strategically necessary demand in an intelligent transportation system to alleviate traffic pressure, coordinate operation schedules, and plan future constructions. Graph-based neural networks have been widely used in traffic flow prediction problems. Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN) captures spatial features according to established connections but ignores the high-order relationships between stations and the travel patterns of passengers. In this paper, we utilize a novel representation to tackle this issue - hypergraph. A dynamic spatio-temporal hypergraph neural network to forecast passenger flow is proposed. In the prediction framework, the primary hypergraph is constructed from metro system topology and then extended with advanced hyperedges discovered from pedestrian travel patterns of multiple time spans. Furthermore, hypergraph convolution and spatio-temporal blocks are proposed to extract spatial and temporal features to achieve node-level prediction. Experiments on historical datasets of Beijing and Hangzhou validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and superior performance of prediction accuracy is achieved compared with the state-of-the-arts.