Analysis of Bus Passenger Flow Characteristics Based on Multi-Time Granularity IC Card Data

IC card data is an important data source of public transport passenger flow. From the perspective of data characteristics, this paper used the Qingdao bus No. 1 IC card data from January to May in 2018 to study the similarity and concentration degree of passenger flow based on the multi-time granularity. Besides, the different features between the peak and off-peak hours, as well as between the workdays and weekends with multi-time granularity were analysed. As for the passenger flow similarity, the statistical result shows that the data similarity increases gradually with the increasing of time granularities both on workdays and weekends, the range of similarity of passenger flow during peak hours is significantly more concentrated than off-peak hours, and the similarity degree of the passenger flow on workdays is slightly higher than that on weekends. As for the degree of concentration, it is positively correlated with the time granularity, and during peak hours, it is significantly higher than the off-peak hours. The mean relative error (RME) was then calculated by the prediction result based on the quadratic exponential smoothing method (QESM), which proved the speculation of the above conclusion.