Prediction of human activity intensity using the interactions in physical and social spaces through graph convolutional networks

Reference: Mingxiao Li, Song Gao, Feng Lu, Kang Liu, Hengcai Zhang, Wei Tu. (2021) Prediction of human activity intensity using the interactions in physical and social spaces through graph convolutional networks. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. X(X), XX-XX.
Abstract: Dynamic human activity intensity information is of great importance in many location-based applications. However, two limitations remain in the prediction of human activity intensity. First, it is hard to learn the spatial interaction patterns across scales for predicting human activities. Second, social interaction can help model the activity intensity variation but is rarely considered in the existing literature. To mitigate these limitations, we proposed a novel dynamic activity intensity prediction method with deep learning on graphs using the interactions in both physical and social spaces. In this method, the physical interactions and social interactions between spatial units were integrated into a fused graph convolutional network to model multi-type spatial interaction patterns. The future activity intensity variation was predicted by combining the spatial interaction pattern and the temporal pattern of activity intensity series. The method was verified with a country-scale anonymized mobile phone dataset. The results demonstrated that our proposed deep learning method with combining graph convolutional networks and recurrent neural networks outperformed other baseline approaches. This method enables dynamic human activity intensity prediction from a more spatially and socially integrated perspective, which helps improve the performance of modeling human dynamics.