Simulating Human Mobility with Agent-based Modeling and Particle Filter Following Mobile Spatial Statistics

Abstract

Human mobility datasets collected from various sources are indispensable for analyzing, predicting, and solving emerging urbanization and population issues. However, such datasets are only available to the public after aggregation and anonymous processing. In recent years, agent-based modeling approaches have addressed this problem by reproducing synthetic human mobility data through simulation. However, the development of such agent models typically requires a large amount of personal location histories as training data for parameter learning, leading to cost and privacy concerns. To overcome this disadvantage, we attempted to explore optimal parameters using a particle filter to alleviate the strict requirement of the data. We tested our method in a local city in Japan using aggregated real-time observation data collected from mobile phone service companies. The results show that the proposed model can achieve satisfactory accuracy using low-resolution data and can therefore be easily used by local governments for municipal applications.