PROB-EMOE: A Probabilistic Ensemble Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Metro Network Expansion Forecasting

Abstract

Forecasting Origin-Destination (OD) demand for new metro lines is critical for sustainable infrastructure planning but faces spatiotemporal out-of-distribution challenges. Existing models often struggle to capture heterogeneous interaction patterns in changing topologies and overlook inherent uncertainty and over-dispersion issues. To bridge these gaps, we propose PROB-EMOE, a planning-oriented probabilistic framework tailored for network expansion. To ensure robust generalization, we design a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) predictor that integrates diverse expert views to capture heterogeneous demand patterns across changing topologies. To quantify extrapolation uncertainty, our framework functions as a unified probabilistic system by synergizing Deep Ensembles with a probabilistic output, effectively quantifying both data and model uncertainty. Through a systematic investigation of likelihood families, we empirically demonstrate that the Negative Binomial distribution offers the optimal fit in this context. Extensive experiments on a multi-year Shenzhen metro dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance and provides the sharpest calibrated uncertainty intervals. The framework has been deployed in a metropolitan smart-data platform to support risk-aware investment decisions.