A novel prediction model for the inbound passenger flow of urban rail transit

High-precision short-term inbound passenger flow prediction is of great significance to the daily crowd management and line rescheduling in urban rail systems. Although current models have been applied to prediction, most methods need optimization to meet refined passenger flow management demand. In order to better predict the passenger flow, a novel Wave-LSTM model, based on long short-term memory network (LSTM) and wavelet, is introduced in this paper. In an empirical study with practical passenger flow data of Dongzhimen Station in the Beijing Subway system, the hybrid model exhibited more effective performance in terms of prediction accuracy than the existing algorithms, e.g., autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), nonlinear regression (NAR), and traditional LSTM model. The study illustrates that our newly adopted model is a promising approach for predicting high-precision short-term inbound passenger flow.