Predicting short-term bus passenger demand using a pattern hybrid approach

• A pattern hybrid model for short-term bus passenger demand prediction is proposed.
• The model assembles knowledge from the historical data and real-time information.
• The model captures pattern estimators nature and transition behaviour between them.
• The model estimates the pattern estimators’ combination in a proactive way.
• The model provides an accurate forecast with strong explanatory power and less complexity.

This paper proposes an Interactive Multiple Model-based Pattern Hybrid (IMMPH) approach to predict short-term passenger demand. The approach maximizes the effective information content by assembling the knowledge from pattern models using historical data and optimizing the interaction between them using real-time observations. It can dynamically estimate the priori pattern models combination in advance for the next time interval. The source demand data were collected by Smart Card system along one bus service route over one year. After correlation analysis, three temporal relevant pattern time series are generated, namely, the weekly, daily and hourly pattern time series. Then statistical pattern models are developed to capture different time series patterns. Finally, an amended IMM algorithm is applied to dynamically combine the pattern models estimations to output the final demand prediction. The proposed IMMPH model is validated by comparing with statistical methods and an artificial neural network based hybrid model. The results suggest that the IMMPH model provides a better forecast performance than its alternatives, including prediction accuracy, robustness, explanatory power and model complexity. The proposed approach can be potentially extended to other short-term time series forecast applications as well, such as traffic flow forecast.