Short-term forecasting of origin-destination matrix in transit system via a deep learning approach

Short-term travel demand forecasting is the critical first step to support transportation system management. Complex relevance among Origin-Destination (OD) pairs, temporal dependencies, and external factors bring challenges to it. An innovative deep learning approach, Multi-Fused Residual Network (MF-ResNet) is proposed to forecast travel demand. The complex relevance among OD pairs is converted into graphical-based spatial dependencies by treating OD matrix as the input of the model. The residual network units enable MF-ResNet to model not only near but also distant spatial correlations. Three conv-based residual network units model the temporal closeness, mid-term periodicity, as well as long-term periodicity features, and Fully-Connected (F-C) layers capture external factors. The fusion techniques coordinate all of the features. The proposed method is applied to the short-term forecasts of metro OD matrix in Shenzhen, China. The experimental results show that MF-ResNet can capture multiple complex dependencies robustly and outperforms traditional methods in terms of forecasting accuracy.