FedMetro: Efficient Metro Passenger Flow Prediction via Federated Graph Learning

Metro passenger flow prediction is crucial for effective urban transportation management. However, its practical adoption is hindered by data silos from distributed automatic fare collection (AFC) systems, compromising prediction accuracy. While federated graph learning facilitates privacy-preserving collaboration, existing methods struggle with the unique challenges of cross-line metro passenger flow prediction, particularly in handling time-evolving spatial correlations and heterogeneous temporal correlations. To address these challenges, we present FedMetro, a novel metro passenger flow prediction system based on federated graph learning. We introduce a federated dynamic graph learning approach with cross-attention mechanisms to capture spatial-temporal correlations in passenger flow. Additionally, we propose a dynamic mask-based communication compression method to mitigate communication bottlenecks in federated inference. Extensive evaluations on three real-world metro AFC datasets demonstrate that FedMetro significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving up to 17.08% higher accuracy while reducing federated inference communication overhead by 77.99%. Practical deployments further confirm its effectiveness in delivering accurate station-level predictions across metro lines. Our code is available at https://github.com/AlexMufeng/FedMetro.