Synthetic People Flow: Privacy-Preserving Mobility Modeling from Large-Scale Location Data in Urban Areas

Naoki Tamura, Kenta Urano, Shunsuke Aoki, Takuro Yonezawa, Nobuo Kawaguchi

Abstract: Recently, there has been an increasing demand for traffic simulation and congestion prediction for urban planning, especially for infection simulation due to the Covid-19 epidemic. On the other hand, the widespread use of wearable devices has made it possible to collect a large amount of user location history with high accuracy, and it is expected that this data will be used for simulation. However, it is difficult to collect location histories for the entire population of a city, and detailed data that can reproduce trajectories is expensive. In addition, such personal location histories contain private information such as addresses and workplaces, which restricts the use of raw data. This paper proposes Agent2Vec, a mobility modeling model based on unsupervised learning. Using this method, we generate synthetic human flow data without personal information.