Paper
Airport Passenger Flow Forecasting via Deformable Temporal-Spectral Transformer Approach
Authors
Wenbo Du, Lingling Han, Ying Xiong, Ling Zhang, Biyue Li, Yisheng Lv, Tong Guo
Abstract
Accurate forecasting of passenger flows is critical for maintaining the efficiency and resilience of airport operations. Recent advances in patch-based Transformer models have shown strong potential in various time series forecasting tasks. However, most existing methods rely on fixed-size patch embedding, making it difficult to model the complex and heterogeneous patterns of airport passenger flows. To address this issue, this paper proposes a deformable temporal-spectral transformer named DTSFormer that integrates a multiscale deformable partitioning module and a joint temporal-spectral filtering module. Specifically, the input sequence is dynamically partitioned into multiscale temporal patches via a novel window function-based masking, enabling the extraction of heterogeneous trends across different temporal stages. Then, within each scale, a frequency-domain attention mechanism is designed to capture both high- and low-frequency components, thereby emphasizing the volatility and periodicity inherent in airport passenger flows. Finally, the resulting multi-frequency features are subsequently fused in the time domain to jointly model short-term fluctuations and long-term trends. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on real-world passenger flow data collected at Beijing Capital International Airport from January 2023 to March 2024. The results indicate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art forecasting models across different prediction horizons. Further analysis shows that the deformable partitioning module aligns patch lengths with dominant periods and heterogeneous trends, enabling superior capture of sudden high-frequency fluctuations.