Passenger flow anomaly detection in urban rail transit networks with graph convolution network-informer and Gaussian Bayes models

Passenger flow anomaly detection in urban rail transit networks (URTNs) is critical in managing surging demand and informing effective operations planning and controls in the network. Existing studies have primarily focused on identifying the source of anomalies at a single station by analysing the time-series characteristics of passenger flow. However, they ignored the high-dimensional and complex spatial features of passenger flow and the dynamic behaviours of passengers in URTNs during anomaly detection. This article proposes a novel anomaly detection methodology based on a deep learning framework consisting of a graph convolution network (GCN)-informer model and a Gaussian naive Bayes model. The GCN-informer model is used to capture the spatial and temporal features of inbound and outbound passenger flows, and it is trained on normal datasets. The Gaussian naive Bayes model is used to construct a binary classifier for anomaly detection, and its parameters are estimated by feeding the normal and abnormal test data into the trained GCN-informer model. Experiments are conducted on a real-world URTN passenger flow dataset from Beijing. The results show that the proposed framework has superior performance compared to existing anomaly detection algorithms in detecting network-level passenger flow anomalies. This article is part of the theme issue 'Artificial intelligence in failure analysis of transportation infrastructure and materials'.