Pseudo-PFLOW: Development of nationwide synthetic open dataset for people movement based on limited travel survey and open statistical data

TL;DR

This paper presents Pseudo-PFLOW, a synthetic nationwide people movement dataset for Japan, created by combining limited survey data with statistical sources, enabling large-scale analysis without privacy concerns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for generating comprehensive synthetic people flow data across Japan using limited urban data and publicly available statistics.

Findings

Coefficient of determination over 0.5 for population distribution and trip volume comparisons

Demonstrates the dataset's potential for urban planning and disaster management

Provides a scalable approach to synthetic mobility data generation

Abstract

People flow data are utilized in diverse fields such as urban and commercial planning and disaster management. However, people flow data collected from mobile phones, such as using global positioning system and call detail records data, are difficult to obtain because of privacy issues. Even if the data were obtained, they would be difficult to handle. This study developed pseudo-people-flow data covering all of Japan by combining public statistical and travel survey data from limited urban areas. This dataset is not a representation of actual travel movements but of typical weekday movements of people. Therefore it is expected to be useful for various purposes. Additionally, the dataset represents the seamless movement of people throughout Japan, with no restrictions on coverage, unlike the travel surveys. In this paper, we propose a method for generating pseudo-people-flow and describe the development of a "Pseudo-PFLOW" dataset covering the entire population of approximately 130 million people. We then evaluated the accuracy of the dataset using mobile phone and trip survey data from multiple metropolitan areas. The results showed that a coefficient of determination of more than 0.5 was confirmed for comparisons regarding population distribution and trip volume.