GeoLife+: Large-Scale Simulated Trajectory Datasets Calibrated to the GeoLife Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces GeoLife+, a large-scale simulated human mobility dataset calibrated to real GeoLife data, combining real-world statistical features with comprehensive simulation for research and application purposes.

Contribution

We develop a calibration method using genetic algorithms to generate realistic, large-scale simulated trajectory datasets based on GeoLife's statistical features.

Findings

GeoLife+ datasets include up to 100,000 users over 6 months.

Calibration achieves high similarity to real GeoLife data.

Large-scale simulated data supports diverse mobility research.

Abstract

Analyzing individual human trajectory data helps our understanding of human mobility and finds many commercial and academic applications. There are two main approaches to accessing trajectory data for research: one involves using real-world datasets like GeoLife, while the other employs simulations to synthesize data. Real-world data provides insights from real human activities, but such data is generally sparse due to voluntary participation. Conversely, simulated data can be more comprehensive but may capture unrealistic human behavior. In this Data and Resource paper, we combine the benefit of both by leveraging the statistical features of real-world data and the comprehensiveness of simulated data. Specifically, we extract features from the real-world GeoLife dataset such as the average number of individual daily trips, average radius of gyration, and maximum and minimum trip distances. We calibrate the Pattern of Life Simulation, a realistic simulation of human mobility, to reproduce these features. Therefore, we use a genetic algorithm to calibrate the parameters of the simulation to mimic the GeoLife features. For this calibration, we simulated numerous random simulation settings, measured the similarity of generated trajectories to GeoLife, and iteratively (over many generations) combined parameter settings of trajectory datasets most similar to GeoLife. Using the calibrated simulation, we simulate large trajectory datasets that we call GeoLife+, where + denotes the Kleene Plus, indicating unlimited replication with at least one occurrence. We provide simulated GeoLife+ data with 182, 1k, and 5k over 5 years, 10k, and 50k over a year and 100k users over 6 months of simulation lifetime.