In the next generation cellular networks, device-to-device (D2D) communication is already considered a fundamental feature. A problem of multi-hop D2D networks is on how to define forwarding algorithms that achieve, at the same time, high delivery ratio and low network overhead. In this paper we aim to understand group meetings' properties by looking at their structure and regularity with the final goal of applying such knowledge in the design of a forwarding algorithm for D2D multi-hop networks. We introduce a forwarding protocol, namely GROUPS-NET, which is aware of social group meetings and their evolution over time. Our algorithm is parameter-calibration free and does not require any knowledge about the social network structure of the system. In particular, different from the state of the art algorithms, GROUPS-NET does not need communities detection, which is a complex and expensive task. We validate our algorithm using different publicly available data-sources. In real large scale scenarios, our algorithm achieves approximately the same delivery ratio of the state-of-art solution with up to 40 less network overhead.
Many studies have used diverse data sources to look into human mobility patterns in the perspective of both individual behavior and collective dynamics. @cite_13 show that human trajectories present a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity. More recently, a dichotomy in individual mobility was revealed in @cite_7 and @cite_2 . Those studies suggest that two mobility profiles, called returners and explorers, govern people movements based on preferential returns and explorations of new places. In relation to collective dynamics, @cite_14 analyze large-scale collective behavior from aggregated call detail records. Their work reveal that the spatio-temporal fluctuations of individuals in a city strongly depend on the activity patterns and routines. Yet, @cite_4 propose an approach for modeling how people move in different metropolitan areas.
@cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_2 @cite_13
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Nowadays, human movement in urban spaces can be traced digitally in many cases. It can be observed that movement patterns are not constant, but vary across time and space. In this work, we characterize such spatio-temporal patterns with an innovative combination of two separate approaches that have been utilized for studying human mobility in the past. First, by using non-negative tensor factorization (NTF), we are able to cluster human behavior based on spatio-temporal dimensions. Second, for characterizing these clusters, we propose to use HypTrails, a Bayesian approach for expressing and comparing hypotheses about human trails. To formalize hypotheses, we utilize publicly available Web data (i.e., Foursquare and census data). By studying taxi data in Manhattan, we can discover and characterize human mobility patterns that cannot be identified in a collective analysis. As one example, we find a group of taxi rides that end at locations with a high number of party venues on weekend nights. Our findings argue for a more fine-grained analysis of human mobility in order to make informed decisions for e.g., enhancing urban structures, tailored traffic control and location-based recommender systems. Even though human movement and mobility patterns have a high degree of freedom and variation, they also exhibit structural patterns due to geographic and social constraints. Using cell phone location data, as well as data from two online location-based social networks, we aim to understand what basic laws govern human motion and dynamics. We find that humans experience a combination of periodic movement that is geographically limited and seemingly random jumps correlated with their social networks. Short-ranged travel is periodic both spatially and temporally and not effected by the social network structure, while long-distance travel is more influenced by social network ties. We show that social relationships can explain about 10 to 30 of all human movement, while periodic behavior explains 50 to 70 . Based on our findings, we develop a model of human mobility that combines periodic short range movements with travel due to the social network structure. We show that our model reliably predicts the locations and dynamics of future human movement and gives an order of magnitude better performance than present models of human mobility. The website wheresgeorge.com invites its users to enter the serial numbers of their US dollar bills and track them across America and beyond. Why? “For fun and because it had not been done yet”, they say. But the dataset accumulated since December 1998 has provided the ideal raw material to test the mathematical laws underlying human travel, and that has important implications for the epidemiology of infectious diseases. Analysis of the trajectories of over half a million dollar bills shows that human dispersal is described by a ‘two-parameter continuous-time random walk’ model: our travel habits conform to a type of random proliferation known as ‘superdiffusion’. And with that much established, it should soon be possible to develop a new class of models to account for the spread of human disease. The dynamic spatial redistribution of individuals is a key driving force of various spatiotemporal phenomena on geographical scales. It can synchronize populations of interacting species, stabilize them, and diversify gene pools1,2,3. Human travel, for example, is responsible for the geographical spread of human infectious disease4,5,6,7,8,9. In the light of increasing international trade, intensified human mobility and the imminent threat of an influenza A epidemic10, the knowledge of dynamical and statistical properties of human travel is of fundamental importance. Despite its crucial role, a quantitative assessment of these properties on geographical scales remains elusive, and the assumption that humans disperse diffusively still prevails in models. Here we report on a solid and quantitative assessment of human travelling statistics by analysing the circulation of bank notes in the United States. Using a comprehensive data set of over a million individual displacements, we find that dispersal is anomalous in two ways. First, the distribution of travelling distances decays as a power law, indicating that trajectories of bank notes are reminiscent of scale-free random walks known as Levy flights. Second, the probability of remaining in a small, spatially confined region for a time T is dominated by algebraically long tails that attenuate the superdiffusive spread. We show that human travelling behaviour can be described mathematically on many spatiotemporal scales by a two-parameter continuous-time random walk model to a surprising accuracy, and conclude that human travel on geographical scales is an ambivalent and effectively superdiffusive process. Individual human trajectories are characterized by fat-tailed distributions of jump sizes and waiting times, suggesting the relevance of continuous-time random-walk (CTRW) models for human mobility. However, human traces are barely random. Given the importance of human mobility, from epidemic modelling to traffic prediction and urban planning, we need quantitative models that can account for the statistical characteristics of individual human trajectories. Here we use empirical data on human mobility, captured by mobile-phone traces, to show that the predictions of the CTRW models are in systematic conflict with the empirical results. We introduce two principles that govern human trajectories, allowing us to build a statistically self-consistent microscopic model for individual human mobility. The model accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws, but also allows us to analytically predict most of the pertinent scaling exponents. Human behavior is often complex and context-dependent. This paper presents a general technique to exploit this "multidimensional" contextual variable for human mobility prediction. We use an ensemble method, in which we extract different mobility patterns with multiple models and then combine these models under a probabilistic framework. The key idea lies in the assumption that human mobility can be explained by several mobility patterns that depend on a sub-set of the contextual variables and these can be learned by a simple model. We showed how this idea can be applied to two specific online prediction tasks: what is the next place a user will visit? and how long will he stay in the current place?. Using smartphone data collected from 153 users during 17 months, we show the potential of our method in predicting human mobility in real life. Human mobility is differentiated by time scales. While the mechanism for long time scales has been studied, the underlying mechanism on the daily scale is still unrevealed. Here, we uncover the mechanism responsible for the daily mobility patterns by analysing the temporal and spatial trajectories of thousands of persons as individual networks. Using the concept of motifs from network theory, we find only 17 unique networks are present in daily mobility and they follow simple rules. These networks, called here motifs, are sufficient to capture up to 90 per cent of the population in surveys and mobile phone datasets for different countries. Each individual exhibits a characteristic motif, which seems to be stable over several months. Consequently, daily human mobility can be reproduced by an analytically tractable framework for Markov chains by modelling periods of high-frequency trips followed by periods of lower activity as the key ingredient. We report that human walk patterns contain statistically similar features observed in Levy walks. These features include heavy-tail flight and pause-time distributions and the super-diffusive nature of mobility. Human walks are not random walks, but it is surprising that the patterns of human walks and Levy walks contain some statistical similarity. Our study is based on 226 daily GPS traces collected from 101 volunteers in five different outdoor sites. The heavy-tail flight distribution of human mobility induces the super-diffusivity of travel, but up to 30 min to 1 h due to the boundary effect of people's daily movement, which is caused by the tendency of people to move within a predefined (also confined) area of daily activities. These tendencies are not captured in common mobility models such as random way point (RWP). To evaluate the impact of these tendencies on the performance of mobile networks, we construct a simple truncated Levy walk mobility (TLW) model that emulates the statistical features observed in our analysis and under which we measure the performance of routing protocols in delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The results indicate the following. Higher diffusivity induces shorter intercontact times in DTN and shorter path durations with higher success probability in MANET. The diffusivity of TLW is in between those of RWP and Brownian motion (BM). Therefore, the routing performance under RWP as commonly used in mobile network studies and tends to be overestimated for DTNs and underestimated for MANETs compared to the performance under TLW. People flow at a citywide level is in a mixed state with several basic patterns (e.g. commuting, working, commercial), and it is therefore difficult to extract useful information from such a mixture of patterns directly. In this paper, we proposed a novel tensor factorization approach to modeling city dynamics in a basic life pattern space (CitySpectral Space). To obtain the CitySpectrum, we utilized Non-negative Tensor Factorization (NTF) to decompose a people flow tensor into basic life pattern tensors, described by three bases i.e. the intensity variation among different regions, the time-of-day and the sample days. We apply our approach to a big mobile phone GPS log dataset (containing 1.6 million users) to model the fluctuation in people flow before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake from a CitySpectral perspective. In addition, our framework is extensible to a variety of auxiliary spatial-temporal data. We parametrize a people flow with a spatial distribution of the Points of Interest (POIs) to quantitatively analyze the relationship between human mobility and POI distribution. Based on the parametric people flow, we propose a spectral approach for a site-selection recommendation and people flow simulation in another similar area using POI distribution. In this work, we discover the daily location-driven routines that are contained in a massive real-life human dataset collected by mobile phones. Our goal is the discovery and analysis of human routines that characterize both individual and group behaviors in terms of location patterns. We develop an unsupervised methodology based on two differing probabilistic topic models and apply them to the daily life of 97 mobile phone users over a 16-month period to achieve these goals. Topic models are probabilistic generative models for documents that identify the latent structure that underlies a set of words. Routines dominating the entire group's activities, identified with a methodology based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model, include “going to work late”, “going home early”, “working nonstop” and “having no reception (phone off)” at different times over varying time-intervals. We also detect routines which are characteristic of users, with a methodology based on the Author-Topic model. With the routines discovered, and the two methods of characterizing days and users, we can then perform various tasks. We use the routines discovered to determine behavioral patterns of users and groups of users. For example, we can find individuals that display specific daily routines, such as “going to work early” or “turning off the mobile (or having no reception) in the evenings”. We are also able to characterize daily patterns by determining the topic structure of days in addition to determining whether certain routines occur dominantly on weekends or weekdays. Furthermore, the routines discovered can be used to rank users or find subgroups of users who display certain routines. We can also characterize users based on their entropy. We compare our method to one based on clustering using K-means. Finally, we analyze an individual's routines over time to determine regions with high variations, which may correspond to specific events. The ubiquitous deployment of mobile and sensor technologies has led to both the capacity to observe human behavior in physical (offline) settings as well as to record it. This provides researchers with a new lens to study and better understand the individual decision processes that were previously unobserved. In this paper, we study decision making behavior of 11,196 taxi drivers in a large Asian city using a rich data set consisting of 10.6 million fine-grained GPS trip records. These records include detailed taxi GPS trajectories, taxi occupancy data (i.e., whether a taxi was occupied with a passenger or was vacant) and taxi drivers’ daily incomes. This capacity to use data where occupancy of the taxi is known is a distinctive feature of our data set and sets this work apart from prior work which has attempted to study driver behavior. The specific decision we focus on pertains to actions drivers take to find new passengers after they have dropped off their current passengers. In particular, we study the role of information derivable from the GPS trace data (e.g., where passengers are dropped off, where passengers are picked up, longitudinal taxicab travel history with fine-grained time stamps) observable by or made available to drivers in enabling them to learn the distribution of demand for their services over space and time. We conduct our study using a heterogeneous Bayesian learning model. We find strong heterogeneity in individual learning behavior and driving decisions, which is significantly associated with individual economic outcomes. Drivers with higher incomes benefit significantly from their ability to learn from not only demand information directly observable in the local market, but also aggregate information on demand flows across markets. Interestingly, our policy simulations indicate information that is noisy at the individual level becomes valuable after being aggregated across various spatial and temporal dimensions. Moreover, the value of information does not increase monotonically with the scale and frequency of information sharing. Finally, our study has important welfare implications in that efficient information sharing leads to an income increase among all drivers, instead of a redistribution of income between different types of drivers. Our work allows us not only to explain driver decision making behavior using these detailed behavioral traces, but also to prescribe information sharing strategy for the firm in order to improve the overall market efficiency. Abstract The availability of new data sources on human mobility is opening new avenues for investigating the interplay of social networks, human mobility and dynamical processes such as epidemic spreading. Here we analyze data on the time-resolved face-to-face proximity of individuals in large-scale real-world scenarios. We compare two settings with very different properties, a scientific conference and a long-running museum exhibition. We track the behavioral networks of face-to-face proximity, and characterize them from both a static and a dynamic point of view, exposing differences and similarities. We use our data to investigate the dynamics of a susceptible–infected model for epidemic spreading that unfolds on the dynamical networks of human proximity. The spreading patterns are markedly different for the conference and the museum case, and they are strongly impacted by the causal structure of the network data. A deeper study of the spreading paths shows that the mere knowledge of static aggregated networks would lead to erroneous conclusions about the transmission paths on the dynamical networks. We examine the fundamental properties that determine the basic performance metrics for opportunistic communications. We first consider the distribution of intercontact times between mobile devices. Using a diverse set of measured mobility traces, we find as an invariant property that there is a characteristic time, order of half a day, beyond which the distribution decays exponentially. Up to this value, the distribution in many cases follows a power law, as shown in recent work. This power law finding was previously used to support the hypothesis that intercontact time has a power law tail, and that common mobility models are not adequate. However, we observe that the timescale of interest for opportunistic forwarding may be of the same order as the characteristic time, and thus, the exponential tail is important. We further show that already simple models such as random walk and random waypoint can exhibit the same dichotomy in the distribution of intercontact time as in empirical traces. Finally, we perform an extensive analysis of several properties of human mobility patterns across several dimensions, and we present empirical evidence that the return time of a mobile device to its favorite location site may already explain the observed dichotomy. Our findings suggest that existing results on the performance of forwarding schemes based on power law tails might be overly pessimistic. Understanding human motion behavior is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like self-driving cars and social robots) if they are to navigate human-centric environments. This is challenging because human motion is inherently multimodal: given a history of human motion paths, there are many socially plausible ways that people could move in the future. We tackle this problem by combining tools from sequence prediction and generative adversarial networks: a recurrent sequence-to-sequence model observes motion histories and predicts future behavior, using a novel pooling mechanism to aggregate information across people. We predict socially plausible futures by training adversarially against a recurrent discriminator, and encourage diverse predictions with a novel variety loss. Through experiments on several datasets we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior work in terms of accuracy, variety, collision avoidance, and computational complexity. Understanding human motion behavior is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like self-driving cars and social robots) if they are to navigate human-centric environments. This is challenging because human motion is inherently multimodal: given a history of human motion paths, there are many socially plausible ways that people could move in the future. We tackle this problem by combining tools from sequence prediction and generative adversarial networks: a recurrent sequence-to-sequence model observes motion histories and predicts future behavior, using a novel pooling mechanism to aggregate information across people. We predict socially plausible futures by training adversarially against a recurrent discriminator, and encourage diverse predictions with a novel variety loss. Through experiments on several datasets we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior work in terms of accuracy, variety, collision avoidance, and computational complexity. There is substantial interest in the effect of human mobility patterns on opportunistic communications. Inspired by recent work revisiting some of the early evidence for a L´evy flight foraging strategy in animals, we analyse datasets on human contact from real world traces. By analysing the distribution of inter-contact times on different time scales and using different graphical forms, we find not only the highly skewed distributions of waiting times highlighted in previous studies but also clear circadian rhythm. The relative visibility of these two components depends strongly on which graphical form is adopted and the range of time scales. We use a simple model to reconstruct the observed behaviour and discuss the implications of this for forwarding efficiency. Modeling the properties of individual human mobility is a challenging task that has received increasing attention in the last decade. Since mobility is a complex system, when modeling individual human mobility one should take into account that human movements at a collective level influence, and are influenced by, human movement at an individual level. In this paper the authors propose the d-EPR model, which exploits collective information and the gravity model to drive the movements of an individual and the exploration of new places on the mobility space. They implement their model to simulate the mobility of thousands synthetic individuals, and compare the synthetic movements with real trajectories of mobile phone users and synthetic trajectories produced by a prominent individual mobility model. The authors show that the distributions of global mobility measures computed on the trajectories produced by the d-EPR model are much closer to empirical data, highlighting the importance of considering collective information when simulating individual human mobility. We propose a novel model for the spatio-temporal clustering of trajectories based on motion, which applies to challenging street-view video sequences of pedestrians captured by a mobile camera. A key contribution of our work is the introduction of novel probabilistic region trajectories, motivated by the non-repeatability of segmentation of frames in a video sequence. Hierarchical image segments are obtained by using a state-of-the-art hierarchical segmentation algorithm, and connected from adjacent frames in a directed acyclic graph. The region trajectories and measures of confidence are extracted from this graph using a dynamic programming-based optimisation. Our second main contribution is a Bayesian framework with a twofold goal: to learn the optimal, in a maximum likelihood sense, Random Forests classifier of motion patterns based on video features, and construct a unique graph from region trajectories of different frames, lengths and hierarchical levels. Finally, we demonstrate the use of Isomap for effective spatio-temporal clustering of the region trajectories of pedestrians. We support our claims with experimental results on new and existing challenging video sequences. We present a large-scale study of user behavior in Foursquare, conducted on a dataset of about 700 thousand users that spans a period of more than 100 days. We analyze user checkin dynamics, demonstrating how it reveals meaningful spatio-temporal patterns and offers the opportunity to study both user mobility and urban spaces. Our aim is to inform on how scientific researchers could utilise data generated in Location-based Social Networks to attain a deeper understanding of human mobility and how developers may take advantage of such systems to enhance applications such as recommender systems. In crowded spaces such as city centers or train stations, human mobility looks complex, but is often influenced only by a few causes. We propose to quantitatively study crowded environments by introducing a dataset of 42 million trajectories collected in train stations. Given this dataset, we address the problem of forecasting pedestrians' destinations, a central problem in understanding large-scale crowd mobility. We need to overcome the challenges posed by a limited number of observations (e.g. sparse cameras), and change in pedestrian appearance cues across different cameras. In addition, we often have restrictions in the way pedestrians can move in a scene, encoded as priors over origin and destination (OD) preferences. We propose a new descriptor coined as Social Affinity Maps (SAM) to link broken or unobserved trajectories of individuals in the crowd, while using the OD-prior in our framework. Our experiments show improvement in performance through the use of SAM features and OD prior. To the best of our knowledge, our work is one of the first studies that provides encouraging results towards a better understanding of crowd behavior at the scale of million pedestrians. Location is a key context ingredient and many existing pervasive applications rely on the current locations of their users. However, with the ability to predict the future location and movement behavior of a user, the usability of these applications can be greatly improved. In this paper, we propose an approach to predict both the intended destination and the future route of a person. Rather than predicting the destination and future route separately, we have focused on making prediction in an integrated way by exploiting personal movement data (i.e. trajectories) collected by GPS. Since trajectories contain daily whereabouts information of a person, the proposed approach first detects the significant places where the person may depart from or go to using a clustering-based algorithm called FBM (Forward-Backward Matching), then abstracts the trajectories based on a space partitioning method, and finally extracts movement patterns from the abstracted trajectories using an extended CRPM (Continuous Route Pattern Mining) algorithm. Extracted movement patterns are organized in terms of origin-destination couples. The prediction is made based on a pattern tree built from these movement patterns. With the real personal movement data of 14 participants, we conducted a number of experiments to evaluate the performance of our system. The results show that our approach can achieve approximately 80 and 60 accuracy in destination prediction and 1-step prediction, respectively, and result in an average deviation of approximately 60 m in continuous future route prediction. Finally, based on the proposed approach, we implemented a prototype running on mobile phones, which can extract patterns from a user's historical movement data and predict the destination and future route.