EAAI Journal 2025 Journal Article
Forecasting train travel times of China–Europe Railway Express through a hybrid deep learning model optimized with a bandit-based approach
- Yongxiang Zhang
- Liting Gu
- Jingwei Guo
- Xu Yan
- Xin Hu
- Zhen-Song Chen
With the globalization of economic trade, the China–Europe Railway Express (CRE) has emerged as a crucial means of international freight transportation. However, since the travel process of CRE trains is subject to various factors (e. g. , customs clearance efficiency, weather changes, etc.), existing models struggle to handle the complex nonlinear characteristics of the travel time data, failing to achieve accurate train travel time predictions. This significantly affects the scheduling and utilization of capacity resources along the CRE routes. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel hybrid deep learning model, i. e. , Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)-Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) (DWT-CNN-BiGRU). Specifically, the DWT technique is first used to preprocess historical train travel time data to reduce noise interference and improve data quality. Then, the CNN module focuses on extracting local spatial features from the data, whereas the BiGRU module emphasizes its long-term temporal dependencies. Furthermore, a bandit-based approach is applied to hyperparameter optimization to further exploit model potentials. By testing on a real-life CRE dataset, the DWT-CNN-BiGRU model demonstrates superior prediction accuracy with root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values respectively equal to 10. 7347 h, 7. 5482 h, and 2. 2034%, and it outperforms the other ten popular baseline models. In conclusion, the proposed DWT-CNN-BiGRU model features a lightweight structure and strong robustness, offering reliable technical support to alleviate capacity resource shortages and improve the service quality of CRE.