New parameter-free mobility model: Opportunity priority selection model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new parameter-free human mobility model called opportunity priority selection, which predicts movement patterns based on opportunity benefits, demonstrating superior accuracy across various cities and countries.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, parameter-free model for human mobility prediction that outperforms previous models in capturing real-world movement patterns.

Findings

The model accurately predicts intra- and intercity mobility patterns.

It is applicable across multiple cities and countries.

The model better captures the underlying mechanisms of human mobility.

Abstract

Predicting human mobility patterns has many practical applications in urban planning, traffic engineering, infectious disease epidemiology, emergency management and location-based services. Developing a universal model capable of accurately predicting the mobility fluxes between locations is a fundamental and challenging problem in regional economics and transportation science. Here, we propose a new parameter-free model named opportunity priority selection model as an alternative in human mobility prediction. The basic assumption of the model is that an individual will select destination locations that present higher opportunity benefits than the location opportunities of the origin and the intervening opportunities between the origin and destination. We use real mobility data collected from a number of cities and countries to demonstrate the predictive ability of this simple model. The results show that the new model offers universal predictions of intracity and intercity mobility patterns that are consistent with real observations, thus suggesting that the proposed model better captures the mechanism underlying human mobility than previous models.