MobTCast: Leveraging Auxiliary Trajectory Forecasting for Human Mobility Prediction

Publication Year: 2021 Publication Type : JournalArticle

Abstract:


Human mobility prediction is a core functionality in many location-based services and applications. However, due to the sparsity of mobility data, it is not an easy task to predict future POIs (place-of-interests) that are going to be visited. In this paper, we propose MobTCast, a Transformer-based context-aware network for mobility prediction. Specifically, we explore the influence of four types of context in mobility prediction: temporal, semantic, social, and geographical contexts. We first design a base mobility feature extractor using the Transformer architecture, which takes both the history POI sequence and the semantic information as input. It handles both the temporal and semantic contexts. Based on the base extractor and the social connections of a user, we employ a self-attention module to model the influence of the social context. Furthermore, unlike existing methods, we introduce a location prediction branch in MobTCast as an auxiliary task to model the geographical context and predict the next location. Intuitively, the geographical distance between the location of the predicted POI and the predicted location from the auxiliary branch should be as close as possible. To reflect this relation, we design a consistency loss to further improve the POI prediction performance. In our experimental results, MobTCast outperforms other state-of-the-art next POI prediction methods. Our approach illustrates the value of including different types of context in next POI prediction.


BibTex:

@inproceedings{xue2021mobtcast, title={MobTCast: Leveraging Auxiliary Trajectory Forecasting for Human Mobility Prediction},
   
    author={Xue, Hao and Salim, Flora and Ren, Yongli and Oliver, Nuria M},
    booktitle={Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
    year={2021}
}

Cite:

Related Publications

RUP: Large Room Utilisation Prediction with carbon dioxide sensor
Type : JournalArticle
Show More
A Scalable Room Occupancy Prediction with Transferable Time Series Decomposition of CO 2 Sensor Data
Type : JournalArticle
Show More
Topical Event Detection on Twitter
Type : ConferenceProceeding
Show More

© 2021 Flora Salim - CRUISE Research Group.