Why do people move? Enhancing human mobility prediction using local functions based on public records and SNS data.

The prediction of human and vehicle mobility in a city is becoming an attracting field. This topic attracts researchers from broad fields including behavioral sciences, where understanding the complexity of the human mobility behavior is one of the hot topic, and also to the industrial partners, who apply such results to many beneficial applications. Recent progress to sensing human mobility via smartphones is boosting this trend. However, due to the complexity and context-dependence of human behavior and the incompleteness and noise of geospatial data collecting from various sensors, the prediction of human and vehicle mobility is still far from solved. This workshop aimed at collecting contributions on the cutting-edge studies in human mobility description, modeling, intelligent computational method which can advance the human and vehicle prediction research. Potential topics included, but were not limited to 1) The next location prediction of individual mobility, 2) The crowd or population mobility prediction, 3) Dynamics of pedestrians, 4) commute flow and migration flow, 5) Traffic congestion, road usage forecast and optimal vehicle routing, 6) Social event forecast using geospatial data, 7) Novel agent mobility simulators, and 8) Case studies of mobility estimation in academia as well as in industrial field.

Effective human mobility modeling and prediction constitute the core prerequisites for various location-based applications. To encourage research in this direction, the ACM SIGSPATIAL Cup 2025 posed the challenge of predicting human mobility trajectories from a sparse multi-city dataset. This paper presents our solution, MoBERT, a BERT-like model that adapts and leverages mobility semantics with additional direction and distance prediction, providing supplementary supervision signals for robust feature learning. MoBERT models are trained in stages through curriculum learning, where augmented trajectories are ordered by increasing mobility entropy for training with progressively increasing difficulty. The final score of our method is 0.14609, as measured by average GEO-BLEU distances across four cities. Finally, we analyze the results and discuss insights from our approach.

In recent decades, the frequency and intensity of natural disasters has increased significantly, and this trend is expected to continue. Therefore, understanding and predicting human behavior and mobility during a disaster will play a vital role in planning effective humanitarian relief, disaster management, and long-term societal reconstruction. However, such research is very difficult to perform owing to the uniqueness of various disasters and the unavailability of reliable and large-scale human mobility data. In this study, we collect big and heterogeneous data (e.g., GPS records of 1.6 million users 1 over 3 years, data on earthquakes that have occurred in Japan over 4 years, news report data, and transportation network data) to study human mobility following natural disasters. An empirical analysis is conducted to explore the basic laws governing human mobility following disasters, and an effective human mobility model is developed to predict and simulate population movements. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our model, and they suggest that human mobility following disasters can be significantly more predictable and be more easily simulated than previously thought.

This paper describes a human mobility prediction system which build by KDDI Research, Inc. to submit for Human Mobility Prediction Challenge (HuMob Challenge) 2024. The system consists of 6 human mobility prediction subsystems: 5 transformer-based subsystems; LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) based subsystem. The system selects the best prediction result out of 6 outputs. Since a task of HuMob Challenge 2024 is to predict human mobility of day 61 to 75 using given human mobility data of day 1 to 60, the selection logic is built by the prediction performance of day 45 to 60 data. Although the selection logic is based on the prediction results on closed data set, the selection thought to work precisely.

With the urban development and enlargement, various regions such as residential zones and administrative districts now appear as parts of cities. People exhibit different mobility patterns in each region, which is closely relevant to region-wide functions. In this article, we propose a scheme to discover region-wide functions using large-scale Shanghai taxicab trajectories that capture enormous traces for more than 13,000 taxicabs over a period of about 3 years. We investigate these taxicab trajectories and conduct an extensive preliminary study. Then, we divide the city into disjointed regions using Voronoi decomposition. By incorporating people's pick-up and drop-off information, we refine the Voronoi partitioning results to identify region-wide functional areas. Finally, we study people's movement frequency on weekdays and weekends for every kind of urban functional regions. We also look into human mobility within or across the identified urban functional regions. Experimental results show that human movement is bounded with the function of urban regions, and more than 90% of people visit neighboring (less than 20km travel distance) functional regions with high probability.

We propose CLIFT ( C ross-City Lif estyle Pattern T ransfer for Human Mobility Prediction), a novel framework that enhances human mobility prediction by integrating general lifestyle patterns shared across cities with city-specific mobility patterns. Accurate human mobility prediction in urban environments is critical for transportation planning, marketing strategies, and disaster response. However, most existing deep learning approaches use only single-city data and exhibit significant performance degradation in small cities with limited training data. These limitations motivate methods that jointly leverage cross-city behavioral patterns and city-specific mobility characteristics. CLIFT addresses this challenge through dual complementary encoders: one captures general lifestyle patterns shared across cities, and the other captures city-specific mobility patterns; their outputs are integrated with a Transformer-based mobility predictor (LP-BERT). This architecture enables the model to jointly capture cross-city transferable behavioral patterns and city-specific mobility characteristics. We evaluated the effectiveness of CLIFT through experiments on the multi-city human mobility dataset LYMob-4Cities, comparing its performance with both single-city and multi-city deep learning-based methods. On average, CLIFT improved GEOBLEU and Top-1 accuracy by 11.1% and 10.6% over the single-city baseline, and by 5.0% and 7.9% over the multi-city baseline, respectively. Furthermore, CLIFT outperformed the top-ranked teams in the international competition, Human Mobility Prediction Challenge 2024 , demonstrating superior predictive performance under the same dataset and task setting.

Urban human mobility prediction is forecasting how people move in cities. It is crucial for many smart city applications including route optimization, preparing for dramatic shifts in modes of transportation, or mitigating the epidemic spread of viruses such as COVID-19. Previous research propose the maximum predictability to derive the theoretical limits of accuracy that any predictive algorithm could achieve on predicting urban human mobility. However, existing maximum predictability only considers the sequential patterns of human movements and neglects the contextual information such as the time or the types of places that people visit, which plays an important role in predicting one's next location. In this paper, we propose new theoretical limits of predictability, namely Context-Transition Predictability, which not only captures the sequential patterns of human mobility, but also considers the contextual information of human behavior. We compare our Context-Transition Predictability with other kinds of predictability and find that it is larger than these existing ones. We also show that our proposed Context-Transition Predictability provides us a better guidance on which predictive algorithm to be used for forecasting the next location when considering the contextual information. Source code is at https://github.com/zcfinal/ContextTransitionPredictability.

As an initial research in human mobility, human mobility prediction can be done by using a time-series predictor algorithm, one of which is ARIMA. ARIMA is short of the integrated moving-average autoregressive. The order of the ARIMA model is represented by the ARIMA symbol (p, d, q), where p is the order of the autoregressive part, d is the order of differencing and q is the order of moving-average process. The research regarding the application of human mobility conducted through five phases, including data collection, data pre-processing, data model building, data prediction and data evaluation. We conducted three times of experiments with different parameters. We defined different value for D, Seasonality, MALags, SMALags and Variance. Based on experiment as conclusion of this research obtained that the best parameter values to get the best MAPE Longitude and MAPE Latitude are Constant = 0, D= 1, Seasonality= 12, MALags = 1, SMALags=12 with MAPE Lon: 0.037433% and MAPE Lat: 0.11632%

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the fundamental urban mobility theories using transit data from Singapore

Mobile communication applications provide a unique data source for the research of human mobility pattern. Based on the distribution data of urban mobile phone users, in this paper is explored the macroscopic dynamical behavior of urban mobility human by using the method of random matrix theory. The largest eigenvalue and the corresponding eigenvector of mobile phone user data deviate far from the distribution of random matrix. The deviations from random matrix vary with time. We find that the largest eigenvalue corresponds to a whole behavior common to all urban human mobility. The results indicate the temporal trends of the mean of correlation coefficient and the largest eigenvalue. We also find that the spatio temporal evolution of the weight of eigenvector components for the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue is very consistent with the fluctuation pattern of the macroscopic behavior of urban human mobility.

Location-based check-in services enable individuals to share their activity-related choices and providing a new source of human activity data for researchers. In this paper urban human mobility and activity patterns are analyzed using location-based data collected from social media applications (e.g. Foursquare and Twitter). We first characterize aggregate activity patterns by finding the distributions of different activity categories over a city geography and thus determine the purpose-specific activity centers. We then characterize individual activity patterns by finding the timing distribution of visiting different places depending on activity category. We also explore the frequency of visiting a place with respect to the rank of the place in individual's visitation records and show interesting match with other results based on mobile phone mobility data. We finally propose a physics-based model of human mobility patterns that can explain the scaling laws observed in the data.

Human mobility prediction is a challenging and crucial task for fostering wide spectrum of location based applications, namely, traffic planning, travel-plan recommendation etc. However, modeling human movement behaviour and predicting next location are non-trivial tasks. We consider the human mobility pattern modeling and predicting next location problem for semantic trajectory data, wherein sparse GPS records are associated with other contextual information. Intuitively, human moves with an intent and the confluence of movement history (GPS traces) and contextual information may help in capturing people's intents at a fine granularity and has potential to improve the efficacy of location prediction problem. In this paper, a hierarchical and layered hidden markov model (HMM) framework for mobility prediction from sparse trajectories has been proposed. Experiment on real-life mobility dataset of Nokia Mobile Data Challenge (MDC) demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed framework even when with sparse GPS traces.

Understanding and predicting mobility are essential for the design and evaluation of future mobile edge caching and networking. Consequently, research on human mobility prediction has drawn significant attention in the last decade. Employing information-theoretic concepts and machine learning methods, earlier research has shown evidence that human behavior can be highly predictable. Whether high predictability manifests itself for different modes of device usage, across spatial and temporal dimensions is still debatable. Despite existing studies, more investigations are needed to capture intrinsic mobility characteristics constraining predictability, to explore more dimensions (e.g. device types) and spatiotemporal granularities, especially with the change in human behavior and technology. We investigate practical predictability of next location visitation across three different dimensions: device type, spatial granularity and temporal spans using an extensive longitudinal dataset, with fine spatial granularity (AP level) covering 16 months. The study reveals device type as an important factor affecting predictability. Ultra-portable devices such as smartphones have "on-the-go" mode of usage (and hence dubbed "Flutes"), whereas laptops are "sit-to-use" (dubbed "Cellos"). The goal of this study is to investigate practical prediction mechanisms to quantify predictability as an aspect of human mobility modeling, across time, space and device types. We apply our systematic analysis to wireless traces from a large university campus. We compare several algorithms using varying degrees of temporal and spatial granularity for the two modes of devices; Flutes vs. Cellos. Through our analysis, we quantify how the mobility of Flutes is less predictable than the mobility of Cellos. In addition, this pattern is consistent across various spatio-temporal granularities, and for different methods (Markov chains, neural networks/deep learning, entropy-based estimators). This work substantiates the importance of predictability as an essential aspect of human mobility, with direct application in predictive caching, user behavior modeling and mobility simulations.

The research objectives are exploring characteristics of human mobility patterns, subsequently modelling them mathematically depending on inter-event time ∆t and traveled distances ∆rparameters using CDRs (Call Detailed Records). The observations are obtained from Armada festival in France. Understanding, modelling and simulating human mobility among urban regions is excitement approach, due to itsimportance in rescue situations for various events either indoor events like evacuation of buildings or outdoor ones like public assemblies,community evacuation in casesemerged during emergency situations, moreover serves urban planning and smart cities. The results of numerical simulation are consistent withpreviousinvestigations findings in that real systems patterns are almost follow an exponential distribution.Further experimentations could classify mobility patterns into major classes (work or off) days, also radius of gyration could be considered as influential parameter in modelling human mobility, additionally city rhythm could be extracted by modelling mobility speed of individuals.

Rapidly developing location acquisition technologies provide a powerful tool for understanding and predicting human mobility in cities, which is very significant for urban planning, traffic regulation, and emergency management. However, with the existing methodologies, it is still difficult to accurately predict millions of peoples’ mobility in a large urban area such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, especially when collected data used for model training are often limited to a small portion of the total population. Obviously, human activities in city are closely linked with point-of-interest (POI) information, which can reflect the semantic meaning of human mobility. This motivates us to fuse human mobility data and city POI data to improve the prediction performance with limited training data, but current fusion technologies can hardly handle these two heterogeneous data. Therefore, we propose a unique POI-embedding mechanism, that aggregates the regional POIs by categories to generate an artificial POI-image for each urban grid and enriches each trajectory snippet to a four-dimensional tensor in an analogous manner to a short video. Then, we design a deep learning architecture combining CNN with LSTM to simultaneously capture both the spatiotemporal and geographical information from the enriched trajectories. Furthermore, transfer learning is employed to transfer mobility knowledge from one city to another, so that we can fully utilize other cities’ data to train a stronger model for the target city with only limited data available. Finally, we achieve satisfactory performance of human mobility prediction at the citywide level using a limited amount of trajectories as training data, which has been validated over five urban areas of different types and scales.