71401156 and 71171089), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral selleck product Program of Higher Education of China (Grant no. 20130142110051), Humanity and Sociology Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (Grant no. 11YJC630019), as well as Contemporary Business and Trade Research Center and Center for Collaborative Innovation Studies of Modern Business of Zhejiang Gongshang University of China (Grant no. 14SMXY05YB). Conflict of Interests The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.
High-speed railway as a kind of large volume passenger transportation mode has been well developed in Europe and Japan and has been

developing in China in an even larger scale

and has been planned to develop in American continent. In these areas, high-speed railway plays the role of backbone of passenger transportation systems. How to raise operation of the efficiency and how to make the passenger service decision-making more demand-responsive have been the most important focus to the research concerned. As one of the most important basics for the decision-making on high-speed railway transportation pattern and train operation planning, passenger flow forecast is of essential importance, and short-term passenger flow forecast is the key to the success of daily operation management. Recently, many forecast techniques have been used to solve the prediction problems. Lin and Yang applied the grey forecasting model to forecast the output value of Taiwan’s optoelectronics industry accurately from 2000 to 2005 [1]. In [2], four models were developed and tested for the freeway traffic flow forecasting problem. They were the historical average, time-series, neural network, and nonparametric regression models. The nonparametric regression model significantly outperformed

the other models. Du and Ren [3] proposed a prediction model of train passenger flow volume to help the railway administration’s analysis of running strategies. The model was analysed based on industrial GSK-3 economic indexes and Cobb-Douglas theory to make the prediction. Particularly, ARIMA model has become one of the most common approaches of parametric forecast since the 1970s. The ARIMA model is a linear combination of time-lagged variables and error terms, which has been widely applied in forecasting short-term traffic data such as traffic flow, travel time, and speed. In [4], time series of traffic flow data are characterized by definite periodic cycles. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and Winters exponential smoothing models were developed. In [5], it was presented that the theoretical basis for modeling univariate traffic condition data streams as seasonal ARIMA process. In [6], Hamed et al.