A refined limit on the predictability of human mobility

Smith, Gavin; Wieser, Romain; Goulding, James; Barrack, Duncan

Abstract

It has been recently claimed that human movement is highly predictable. While an upper bound of 93% predictability was shown, this was based upon human movement trajectories of very high spatiotemporal granularity. Recent studies reduced this spatiotemporal granularity down to the level of GPS data, and under a similar methodology results once again suggested a high predictability upper bound (i.e. 90% when movement was quantized down to a spatial resolution approximately the size of a large building). In this work we reconsider the derivation of the upper bound to movement predictability. By considering real-world topological constraints we are able to achieve a tighter upper bound, representing a more refined limit to the predictability of human movement. Our results show that this upper bound is between 11-24% less than previously claimed at a spatial resolution of approx. 100m_100m, with a greater improvement for finer spatial resolutions. This indicates that human mobility is potentially less predictable than previously thought. We provide an in-depth examination of how varying the spatial and temporal quantization affects predictability, and consider the impact of corresponding limits using a large set of real-world GPS traces. Particularly at fine-grained spatial quantizations where a significant number of practical applications lie, these new (lower) upper limits raise serious questions about the use of location information alone for prediction, contributing more evidence that such prediction must integrate external variables.

Citation

Smith, G., Wieser, R., Goulding, J., & Barrack, D. (2014). A refined limit on the predictability of human mobility. In 2014 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom). https://doi.org/10.1109/PerCom.2014.6813948

• Conference Name: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom)
• End Date: Mar 28, 2014
• Acceptance Date: Jan 24, 2014
• Publication Date: Mar 24, 2014
• Deposit Date: Jun 4, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 4, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/PerCom.2014.6813948
• Keywords: Global Positioning System; XML; Logic gates
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/724501
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/PerCom.2014.6813948
• Additional Information: © 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PERCOM 2014)9781479934454.