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The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically transformed human mobility patterns. Therefore, human mobility prediction for the “new normal” is crucial to infrastructure redesign, emergency management, and urban planning post the pandemic. This paper aims to predict people’s number of visits to various locations in New York City using COVID and mobility data in the past two years. To quantitatively model the impact of COVID cases on human mobility patterns and predict mobility patterns across the pandemic period, this paper develops a model CCAAT-GCN (Cross- andContext-Attention based Spatial-TemporalGraphConvolutionalNetworks). The proposed model is validated using SafeGraph data in New York City from August 2020 to April 2022. A rich set of baselines are performed to demonstrate the performance of our proposed model. Results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Also, the attention matrix learned by our model exhibits a strong alignment with the COVID-19 situation and the points of interest within the geographic region. This alignment suggests that the model effectively captures the intricate relationships between COVID-19 case rates and human mobility patterns. The developed model and findings can offer insights into the mobility pattern prediction for future disruptive events and pandemics, so as to assist with emergency preparedness for planners, decision-makers and policymakers.
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A spatiotemporal decay model of human mobility when facing large-scale crises
A common feature of large-scale extreme events, such as pandemics, wildfires, and major storms is that, despite their differences in etiology and duration, they significantly change routine human movement patterns. Such changes, which can be major or minor in size and duration and which differ across contexts, affect both the consequences of the events and the ability of governments to mount effective responses. Based on naturally tracked, anonymized mobility behavior from over 90 million people in the United States, we document these mobility differences in space and over time in six large-scale crises, including wildfires, major tropical storms, winter freeze and pandemics. We introduce a model that effectively captures the high-dimensional heterogeneity in human mobility changes following large-scale extreme events. Across five different metrics and regardless of spatial resolution, the changes in human mobility behavior exhibit a consistent hyperbolic decline, a pattern we characterize as “spatiotemporal decay.” When applied to the case of COVID-19, our model also uncovers significant disparities in mobility changes—individuals from wealthy areas not only reduce their mobility at higher rates at the start of the pandemic but also maintain the change longer. Residents from lower-income regions show a faster and greater hyperbolic decay, which we suggest may help account for different COVID-19 rates. Our model represents a powerful tool to understand and forecast mobility patterns post emergency, and thus to help produce more effective responses.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2047488
- PAR ID:
- 10405445
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 119
- Issue:
- 33
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2203042119
