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Deep Gravity: enhancing mobility flows generation with deep neural networks and geographic information
The movements of individuals within and among cities influence key aspects of
our society, such as the objective and subjective well-being, the diffusion of
innovations, the spreading of epidemics, and the quality of the environment.
For this reason, there is increasing interest around the challenging problem of
flow generation, which consists in generating the flows between a set of
geographic locations, given the characteristics of the locations and without
any information about the real flows. Existing solutions to flow generation are
mainly based on mechanistic approaches, such as the gravity model and the
radiation model, which suffer from underfitting and overdispersion, neglect
important variables such as land use and the transportation network, and cannot
describe non-linear relationships between these variables. In this paper, we
propose the Multi-Feature Deep Gravity (MFDG) model as an effective solution to
flow generation. On the one hand, the MFDG model exploits a large number of
variables (e.g., characteristics of land use and the road network; transport,
food, and health facilities) extracted from voluntary geographic information
data (OpenStreetMap). On the other hand, our model exploits deep neural
networks to describe complex non-linear relationships between those variables.
Our experiments, conducted on commuting flows in England, show that the MFDG
model achieves a significant increase in the performance (up to 250\% for
highly populated areas) than mechanistic models that do not use deep neural
networks, or that do not exploit geographic voluntary data. Our work presents a
precise definition of the flow generation problem, which is a novel task for
the deep learning community working with spatio-temporal data, and proposes a
deep neural network model that significantly outperforms current
state-of-the-art statistical models