Generating synthetic mobility traffic using RNNs

Mobility trajectory datasets are fundamental for system evaluation and experimental reproducibility. Privacy concerns today however, have restricted sharing of such datasets. This has led to the development of synthetic traffic generators, which simulate moving entities to create pseudo-realistic trajectory datasets. Existing work on traffic generation, superficially matches a-priori modeled mobility characteristics, which lacks realism and does not capture the substantive properties of human mobility. Critical applications however, require data that contains these complex, candid and hidden mobility patterns. To this end, we investigate the effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to learn these hidden patterns contained in an original dataset to produce a realistic synthetic dataset. We observe that, the ability of RNNs to learn and model problems over sequential data having long-term temporal dependencies is ideal for capturing the inherent properties of location traces. Additionally, the lack of intuitive high-level spatiotemporal structure and instability, guarantees trajectories that are different from the ones seen in the training dataset. Our preliminary evaluation results show that, our model effectively captures the sleep cycles and stay-points commonly observed in the considered training dataset, along with preserving the statistical characteristics and probability distributions of the movement transitions. Although, many questions remain to be answered, we show that generating synthetic traffic by learning the innate structure of human mobility through RNNs is a promising approach.