MobHet: Predicting Human Mobility Using Heterogeneous Data Sources

The literature is rich in mobility models that aim at predicting human mobility. Yet, these models typically consider only a single kind of data source, such as data from mobile calls or location data obtained from GPS and web applications. Thus, the robustness and effectiveness of such data-driven models from the literature remain unknown when using heterogeneous types of data. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel family of data-driven models, called MobHet, to predict human mobility using heterogeneous data sources. Our proposal is designed to use a combination of features capturing the popularity of a region, the frequency of transitions between regions, and the contacts of a user, which can be extracted from data obtained from various sources, both separately and conjointly. We evaluate the MobHet models, comparing them among themselves and with two single-source data-driven models, namely SMOOTH and Leap Graph, while considering different scenarios with single as well as multiple data sources. Our experimental results show that our best MobHet model produces results that are better than or at least comparable to the best baseline in all considered scenarios, unlike the previous models whose performance is very dependent on the particular type of data used. Our results thus attest the robustness of our proposed solution to the use of heterogeneous data sources in predicting human mobility.