Revealing an Inherently Limiting Factor in Human Mobility Prediction

Predicting how humans move within space and time is a central topic in many scientific domains such as epidemic propagation, urban planning, and ride-sharing. However, current studies neglect individuals’ preferences to explore and discover new areas. Yet, neglecting novelty-seeking activities at first glance appears to be inconsequential on the ability to understand and predict individuals’ trajectories. We claim and show the opposite in this work: exploration-like visits strongly impact mobility understanding and anticipation. We start by proposing a new approach to identifying exploration visits. Based on that, we construct individuals’ mobility profiles using their exploration inclinations –
Scouters
(i.e., extreme explorers),
Routiners
(i.e., extreme returners), and
Regulars
(i.e., with no extreme behavior). Finally, we evaluate the impacts of novelty-seeking, quality of the data, and the prediction task formulation on the theoretical and practical predictability extents. The results show the validity of our profiling and highlight the obstructive impacts of novelty-seeking activities on the predictability of human trajectories. In particular, in the next-place prediction task, from 40% to 90% of predicted locations are wrong, notably with
Scouters
.