Novel model for predicting individuals’ movements in dynamic regions of interest

Abstract

The increasing amount of geotagged social media data provides a possible resource for location prediction. However, existing location prediction methods rarely incorporate temporal changes in mobility patterns, which could lead to unreliable predictions. In particular, human mobility patterns have changed greatly in the COVID-19 era. We propose a novel model to predict individuals’ movements in dynamic regions of interest (ROIs), taking into account changes in activity areas and movement regularity. To address changes in the activity areas, we design a new updating strategy that can ensure the realistic extraction of an individual’s ROIs. Then, we develop an integration model for changes in the movement regularity based on two newly proposed prediction methods that consider both rapid and slow changes. The proposed integration model is evaluated based on five real-world social media datasets; three Weibo datasets related to COVID-19 collected in three Chinese cities, one Twitter dataset collected in New York and one dense GPS dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve better performances than state-of-the-art models, especially when mobility patterns change greatly. Combined with related pandemic data, this study will benefit pandemic prevention and control.

Keywords

• location prediction
• human mobility pattern
• online footprint
• social media data