An Analysis of Synthetic Timeseries as an Enabler to Improve Region-based Human Mobility Forecasting

[EN] Motivated by the large number of wearables offering geolocation, human mobility mining has emerged as an novel research field within AI. The study of mobility creates increasingly predictable models in which it is easy to find patterns of behaviour. However, this data is not publicly available...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Morales-García, Juan, Terroso-Saenz, Fernando, Bueno-Crespo, Andrés, Cecilia-Canales, José María|||0000-0001-5648-214X
Format: article
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repository:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:riunet______::7e2a562515fc053c0fa4fd38b104b8e2
Online Access:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/235140
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Deep Learning
Synthetic time series data generation
Generative Adversary Networks
Graph Neural Networks
Time series forecasting
People mobility forecasting
Description
Summary:[EN] Motivated by the large number of wearables offering geolocation, human mobility mining has emerged as an novel research field within AI. The study of mobility creates increasingly predictable models in which it is easy to find patterns of behaviour. However, this data is not publicly available and access to it is restricted to large telecommunications operators. In this context, this paper aims to solve one of the main problems of human mobility databases, i.e. the scarcity of data for the generation of human mobility models. For this purpose, Generative adversarial network (GANs) have been proposed to generate synthetic time-series mobility data. Moreover, several neural network models are proposed to assess the impact of synthetic data generation on the prediction of human mobility. Our results show that the use of synthetic data improves predictions of human mobility compared to models based on available measured data. Specifically, the reinforcement learning with synthetic data benchmark, when compared to using only ground truth data, achieved a 1.22% improvement in R2, a 0.70% reduction in RMSE, a 2.97% decrease in MAE, a 27.07% reduction in MAPE, and an 18.18% improvement in CVRMSE, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing predictive accuracy.