Noise Matters: Diffusion Model-based Urban Mobility Generation with Collaborative Noise Priors

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoDiffMob, a diffusion model with collaborative noise priors that generates realistic urban mobility data by capturing individual and collective patterns, improving data quality and privacy preservation for urban planning.

Contribution

It proposes a novel collaborative noise prior approach in diffusion models to better model spatiotemporal and social dynamics in urban mobility data.

Findings

Achieves over 32% improvement in data realism.

Effectively captures individual and collective mobility patterns.

Supports privacy-preserving synthetic data generation.

Abstract

With global urbanization, the focus on sustainable cities has largely grown, driving research into equity, resilience, and urban planning, which often relies on mobility data. The rise of web-based apps and mobile devices has provided valuable user data for mobility-related research. However, real-world mobility data is costly and raises privacy concerns. To protect privacy while retaining key features of real-world movement, the demand for synthetic data has steadily increased. Recent advances in diffusion models have shown great potential for mobility trajectory generation due to their ability to model randomness and uncertainty. However, existing approaches often directly apply identically distributed (i.i.d.) noise sampling from image generation techniques, which fail to account for the spatiotemporal correlations and social interactions that shape urban mobility patterns. In this paper, we propose CoDiffMob, a diffusion model for urban mobility generation with collaborative noise priors, we emphasize the critical role of noise in diffusion models for generating mobility data. By leveraging both individual movement characteristics and population-wide dynamics, we construct novel collaborative noise priors that provide richer and more informative guidance throughout the generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method, with generated data accurately capturing both individual preferences and collective patterns, achieving an improvement of over 32%. Furthermore, it can effectively replace web-derived mobility data to better support downstream applications, while safeguarding user privacy and fostering a more secure and ethical web. This highlights its tremendous potential for applications in sustainable city-related research. The code and data are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/CoDiffMob.