128,088 research outputs found
Breaking the habit: measuring and predicting departures from routine in individual human mobility
Researchers studying daily life mobility patterns have recently shown that humans are typically highly predictable in their movements. However, no existing work has examined the boundaries of this predictability, where human behaviour transitions temporarily from routine patterns to highly unpredictable states. To address this shortcoming, we tackle two interrelated challenges. First, we develop a novel information-theoretic metric, called instantaneous entropy, to analyse an individual’s mobility patterns and identify temporary departures from routine. Second, to predict such departures in the future, we propose the first Bayesian framework that explicitly models breaks from routine, showing that it outperforms current state-of-the-art predictor
Creating Full Individual-level Location Timelines from Sparse Social Media Data
In many domain applications, a continuous timeline of human locations is
critical; for example for understanding possible locations where a disease may
spread, or the flow of traffic. While data sources such as GPS trackers or Call
Data Records are temporally-rich, they are expensive, often not publicly
available or garnered only in select locations, restricting their wide use.
Conversely, geo-located social media data are publicly and freely available,
but present challenges especially for full timeline inference due to their
sparse nature. We propose a stochastic framework, Intermediate Location
Computing (ILC) which uses prior knowledge about human mobility patterns to
predict every missing location from an individual's social media timeline. We
compare ILC with a state-of-the-art RNN baseline as well as methods that are
optimized for next-location prediction only. For three major cities, ILC
predicts the top 1 location for all missing locations in a timeline, at 1 and
2-hour resolution, with up to 77.2% accuracy (up to 6% better accuracy than all
compared methods). Specifically, ILC also outperforms the RNN in settings of
low data; both cases of very small number of users (under 50), as well as
settings with more users, but with sparser timelines. In general, the RNN model
needs a higher number of users to achieve the same performance as ILC. Overall,
this work illustrates the tradeoff between prior knowledge of heuristics and
more data, for an important societal problem of filling in entire timelines
using freely available, but sparse social media data.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 2 table
Fundamental structures of dynamic social networks
Social systems are in a constant state of flux with dynamics spanning from
minute-by-minute changes to patterns present on the timescale of years.
Accurate models of social dynamics are important for understanding spreading of
influence or diseases, formation of friendships, and the productivity of teams.
While there has been much progress on understanding complex networks over the
past decade, little is known about the regularities governing the
micro-dynamics of social networks. Here we explore the dynamic social network
of a densely-connected population of approximately 1000 individuals and their
interactions in the network of real-world person-to-person proximity measured
via Bluetooth, as well as their telecommunication networks, online social media
contacts, geo-location, and demographic data. These high-resolution data allow
us to observe social groups directly, rendering community detection
unnecessary. Starting from 5-minute time slices we uncover dynamic social
structures expressed on multiple timescales. On the hourly timescale, we find
that gatherings are fluid, with members coming and going, but organized via a
stable core of individuals. Each core represents a social context. Cores
exhibit a pattern of recurring meetings across weeks and months, each with
varying degrees of regularity. Taken together, these findings provide a
powerful simplification of the social network, where cores represent
fundamental structures expressed with strong temporal and spatial regularity.
Using this framework, we explore the complex interplay between social and
geospatial behavior, documenting how the formation of cores are preceded by
coordination behavior in the communication networks, and demonstrating that
social behavior can be predicted with high precision.Comment: Main Manuscript: 16 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Information: 39
pages, 34 figure
Modeling Taxi Drivers' Behaviour for the Next Destination Prediction
In this paper, we study how to model taxi drivers' behaviour and geographical
information for an interesting and challenging task: the next destination
prediction in a taxi journey. Predicting the next location is a well studied
problem in human mobility, which finds several applications in real-world
scenarios, from optimizing the efficiency of electronic dispatching systems to
predicting and reducing the traffic jam. This task is normally modeled as a
multiclass classification problem, where the goal is to select, among a set of
already known locations, the next taxi destination. We present a Recurrent
Neural Network (RNN) approach that models the taxi drivers' behaviour and
encodes the semantics of visited locations by using geographical information
from Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs). In particular, RNNs are trained to
predict the exact coordinates of the next destination, overcoming the problem
of producing, in output, a limited set of locations, seen during the training
phase. The proposed approach was tested on the ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge
2015 dataset - based on the city of Porto -, obtaining better results with
respect to the competition winner, whilst using less information, and on
Manhattan and San Francisco datasets.Comment: preprint version of a paper submitted to IEEE Transactions on
Intelligent Transportation System
Physicists, stamp collectors, human mobility forecasters
One of the two reviewers studied in high school to be a physicist. In the end, he became something else, but he never lost his awe of physics. The other reviewer never intended to become a physicist, but he sometimes asks himself why he didn’t become one. Today, they are both sociologists who practice their science on an action theory basis and believe that regularities exist in the
world of social actions which can be perceived, understood, explained – and even used for making predictions
On the Inability of Markov Models to Capture Criticality in Human Mobility
We examine the non-Markovian nature of human mobility by exposing the
inability of Markov models to capture criticality in human mobility. In
particular, the assumed Markovian nature of mobility was used to establish a
theoretical upper bound on the predictability of human mobility (expressed as a
minimum error probability limit), based on temporally correlated entropy. Since
its inception, this bound has been widely used and empirically validated using
Markov chains. We show that recurrent-neural architectures can achieve
significantly higher predictability, surpassing this widely used upper bound.
In order to explain this anomaly, we shed light on several underlying
assumptions in previous research works that has resulted in this bias. By
evaluating the mobility predictability on real-world datasets, we show that
human mobility exhibits scale-invariant long-range correlations, bearing
similarity to a power-law decay. This is in contrast to the initial assumption
that human mobility follows an exponential decay. This assumption of
exponential decay coupled with Lempel-Ziv compression in computing Fano's
inequality has led to an inaccurate estimation of the predictability upper
bound. We show that this approach inflates the entropy, consequently lowering
the upper bound on human mobility predictability. We finally highlight that
this approach tends to overlook long-range correlations in human mobility. This
explains why recurrent-neural architectures that are designed to handle
long-range structural correlations surpass the previously computed upper bound
on mobility predictability
Probabilistic Human Mobility Model in Indoor Environment
Understanding human mobility is important for the development of intelligent
mobile service robots as it can provide prior knowledge and predictions of
human distribution for robot-assisted activities. In this paper, we propose a
probabilistic method to model human motion behaviors which is determined by
both internal and external factors in an indoor environment. While the internal
factors are represented by the individual preferences, aims and interests, the
external factors are indicated by the stimulation of the environment. We model
the randomness of human macro-level movement, e.g., the probability of visiting
a specific place and staying time, under the Bayesian framework, considering
the influence of both internal and external variables. We use two case studies
in a shopping mall and in a college student dorm building to show the
effectiveness of our proposed probabilistic human mobility model. Real
surveillance camera data are used to validate the proposed model together with
survey data in the case study of student dorm.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
(IJCNN) 201
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