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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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This content will become publicly available on October 29, 2025
Human Mobility Challenge: Are Transformers Effective for Human Mobility Prediction?
Transformer-based models are popular for time series forecasting and spatiotemporal prediction due to their ability to infer semantic correlations in long sequences. However, for human mobility prediction, temporal correlations, such as location patterns at the same time on previous days or weeks, are essential. While positional encodings help retain order, the self-attention mechanism causes a loss of temporal detail. To validate this claim, we used a simple approach in the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL Human Mobility Prediction Challenge, predicting locations based on past patterns weighted by reliability scores for missing data. Our simple approach was among the top 10 competitors and significantly outperformed the Transformer-based model that won the 2023 challenge.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2109647
- PAR ID:
- 10582625
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400711503
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 60 to 63
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Human Mobility, Patterns of Life, Historical Heuristic
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Atlanta GA USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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