A Hybrid LSTM-CPS Approach for Long-Term Prediction of Train Delays in Multivariate Time Series

In many big cities, train delays are among the most complained-about events by the public. Although various models have been proposed for train delay prediction, prior studies on both primary and secondary train delay prediction are limited in number. Recent advances in deep learning approaches and increasing availability of various data sources has created new opportunities for more efficient and accurate train delay prediction. In this study, we propose a hybrid deep learning solution by integrating long short-term memory (LSTM) and Critical Point Search (CPS). LSTM deals with long-term prediction tasks of trains’ running time and dwell time, while CPS uses predicted values with a nominal timetable to identify primary and secondary delays based on the delay causes, run-time delay, and dwell time delay. To validate the model and analyse its performance, we compare the standard LSTM with the proposed hybrid model. The results demonstrate that new variants outperform the standard LSTM, based on predicting time steps of dwell time feature. The experiment results also showed many irregularities of historical trends, which draws attention for further research.