Designing on-board explainable passenger flow prediction

Nowadays, predicting public transport passenger flow (PF) is essential to optimize service planning and provide information to commuters. However, while current research focuses on enhancing accuracy using advanced models, like recurrent and graph neural networks, other key aspects, such as interpretability and computational efficiency, are often neglected. To fill this gap, we propose a framework to design on-board explainable PF prediction based on eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). This framework enhances model interpretability and reduces computational costs, making the resulting PF predictive model suitable for inference on low-end devices. The proposed framework is validated on a real-world dataset from a major Italian city, involving 25 buses. Our results show that the framework achieves performance comparable to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), with only a 0.2% percentage increase in Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Additionally, it significantly reduces both inference time and energy consumption, with percentage decrease of 63%. Finally, we present examples to illustrate the interpretability of the predictions using the SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) method. • Passenger flow (PF) prediction supports transport companies and passengers. • Currently, the main objective of research on PF is maximizing accuracy. • Our XGBoost-based framework provide accurate and explainable predictions. • The resulting model can be effectively executed on low end devices.