Regularity and Conformity: Location Prediction Using Heterogeneous Mobility Data

Mobility prediction enables appealing proactive experiences for location-aware services and offers essential intelligence to business and governments. Recent studies suggest that human mobility is highly regular and predictable. Additionally, social conformity theory indicates that people's movements are influenced by others. However, existing approaches for location prediction fail to organically combine both the regularity and conformity of human mobility in a unified model, and lack the capacity to incorporate heterogeneous mobility datasets to boost prediction performance. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a hybrid predictive model integrating both the regularity and conformity of human mobility as well as their mutual reinforcement. In addition, we further elevate the predictive power of our model by learning location profiles from heterogeneous mobility datasets based on a gravity model. We evaluate the proposed model using several city-scale mobility datasets including location check-ins, GPS trajectories of taxis, and public transit data. The experimental results validate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for mobility prediction in terms of multiple metrics such as accuracy and percentile rank. The results also suggest that the predictability of human mobility is time-varying, e.g., the overall predictability is higher on workdays than holidays while predicting users' unvisited locations is more challenging for workdays than holidays.