Identifying atypical travel patterns for improved medium-term mobility prediction

Abstract

During the last decades, concepts of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) were continuously adapted and improved based on new insights into human travel behavior. Drivers for improvements are the quantity and quality of available mobility data, which increased significantly in recent years. Based on travel behavior, literature proposes a large number of different solutions for next step or future location prediction. However a holistic spatio-temporal prediction, which could further improve the quality of ITS, creates a more complex task. The prediction of medium-term mobility for one to seven days is challenging in particular for atypical travel behavior, since the weekdays’ order delivers no reliable indication for the next day’s travel behavior. With our contribution, we explore the benefits of various prediction approaches for medium-term mobility prediction and combine them dynamically to predict individual mobility behavior for a period of one week. The derived framework utilizes an exhaustive search approach to benefit from a machine learning based clustering method on location data. In conjunction with an Artificial Neural Network, the prediction framework is robust against prediction errors created by atypical behavior. With two data sets consisting of smartphone and vehicle data, we demonstrate the framework’s real-world applicability. We show that clustering an individual’s historical movement data can improve the prediction accuracy of different prediction methods that will be explained in detail and illustrate the interrelation of entropy and prediction accuracy.