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  • COVID-GAN+: Estimating Human Mobility Responses to COVID-19 through Spatio-temporal Generative Adversarial Networks with Enhanced Features
Title: COVID-GAN+: Estimating Human Mobility Responses to COVID-19 through Spatio-temporal Generative Adversarial Networks with Enhanced Features
Estimating human mobility responses to the large-scale spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial, since its significance guides policymakers to give Non-pharmaceutical Interventions, such as closure or reopening of businesses. It is challenging to model due to complex social contexts and limited training data. Recently, we proposed a conditional generative adversarial network (COVID-GAN) to estimate human mobility response under a set of social and policy conditions integrated from multiple data sources. Although COVID-GAN achieves a good average estimation accuracy under real-world conditions, it produces higher errors in certain regions due to the presence of spatial heterogeneity and outliers. To address these issues, in this article, we extend our prior work by introducing a new spatio-temporal deep generative model, namely, COVID-GAN+. COVID-GAN+ deals with the spatial heterogeneity issue by introducing a new spatial feature layer that utilizes the local Moran statistic to model the spatial heterogeneity strength in the data. In addition, we redesign the training objective to learn the estimated mobility changes from historical average levels to mitigate the effects of spatial outliers. We perform comprehensive evaluations using urban mobility data derived from cell phone records and census data. Results show that COVID-GAN+ can better approximate real-world human mobility responses than prior methods, including COVID-GAN.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1942680 1952085 2105133
NSF-PAR ID:
10326802
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
Volume:
13
Issue:
2
ISSN:
2157-6904
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 23
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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