Using GANs for Generation of Realistic City-Scale Ride Sharing/Hailing Data Sets

Abhinav Jauhri, Brad Stocks, Jian Hui Li, Koichi Yamada, John Paul Shen

Abstract: This paper focuses on the synthetic generation of human mobility data in urban areas. We present a novel and scalable application of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for modeling and generating human mobility data. We leverage actual ride requests from ride sharing/hailing services from four major cities in the US to train our GANs model. Our model captures the spatial and temporal variability of the ride-request patterns observed for all four cities on any typical day and over any typical week. Previous works have succinctly characterized the spatial and temporal properties of human mobility data sets using the fractal dimensionality and the densification power law, respectively, which we utilize to validate our GANs-generated synthetic data sets. Such synthetic data sets can avoid privacy concerns and be extremely useful for researchers and policy makers on urban mobility and intelligent transportation.

Keywords: ride-sharing, generative modeling, parallelization, application

TL;DR: This paper focuses on the synthetic generation of human mobility data in urban areas using GANs.