Crowd Flow Prediction from Mobile Traces Through Time Series PoI Stay Counts

Predicting crowd flow is crucial for decision-making to mitigate various risks. For instance, in social problems such as traffic congestion and over-tourism, countermeasures can be taken by predicting crowd flows in advance. Typically, people visit multiple Points of Interest (PoI) for various purposes. Previous work has proposed methods to incorporate the behavioral characteristics of people in different areas, such as dining areas or office areas, into machine learning models. However, they have not considered the specific behavioral characteristics associated with each PoI, such as when restaurants or train stations experience peak periods. Recently, there has been an increase in the ability to handle large amounts of location information, leading to a growth in the volume of individual trace data. In this study, we propose a crowd flow prediction method that aggregates large-scale individual trace data of movements between PoIs and considers the behavioral characteristics associated with each PoI. We define this information as time series PoI stay counts generated from trace data collected from mobile phones. Using this, we developed a machine learning model to predict the number of people in an area (mesh) over the next several minutes to hours. This prediction is based on the number of people staying at each PoI (category) in neighboring areas (meshes). We applied this approach to densely populated areas in central Tokyo, where congestion is a significant concern, and conducted validation. The results showed that the method utilizing time series PoI stay counts improved prediction accuracy by up to 50% compared to methods that did not use it. Additionally, the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) for predicting the number of people staying 1 hour later was only 2.57%.