Lance Kennedy

Chanuka Algama, Taylor Anderson, Henrique Ferraz de Arruda et al.

We introduce SF-LIFE, a large-scale simulated movement dataset designed to accelerate research in transportation, mobility, and machine learning. The dataset contains 3,024,000,000,000 location records capturing complete, noise-free, multi-modality trajectories of 500,000 simulated agents observed at a 1Hz frequency navigating the San Francisco Bay Area network over a 70-day period. The data captures (1) needs-driven daily agendas of individual agents generated by an agent-based simulation of human patterns of life and (2) detailed kinematic trajectories moving agents across the OpenStreetMap representation of San Francisco using data from 40+ transit agencies across 9 counties. SF-LIFE provides unprecedented scale and detail as trajectories are based on real transit infrastructure using San Francisco General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data, having agent movements across multiple modalities, including bus, rail, bike, automobile, and walking. For this high-fidelity simulated representation of San Francisco, we provide (1) the full trajectory data annotated with transportation mode labels, (2) reduced-size versions of the trajectory data with reduced temporal frequency, (3) agent activity information describing the causal activity why an agent visits a place, (4) agent demographic data, and (5) the underlying OSM road network and building data. As the first dataset of its scale and level of detail, SF-LIFE overcomes the privacy, noise, and completeness limitations inherent in real-world tracking data, providing a robust and ethically sourced resource for research in transit optimization, human mobility analysis, and urban computing.

Yueyang Liu, Lance Kennedy, Hossein Amiri et al.

Human trajectory anomaly detection has become increasingly important across a wide range of applications, including security surveillance and public health. However, existing trajectory anomaly detection methods are primarily focused on vehicle-level traffic, while human-level trajectory anomaly detection remains under-explored. Since human trajectory data is often very sparse, machine learning methods have become the preferred approach for identifying complex patterns. However, concerns regarding potential biases and the robustness of these models have intensified the demand for more transparent and explainable alternatives. In response to these challenges, our research focuses on developing a lightweight anomaly detection model specifically designed to detect anomalies in human trajectories. We propose a Neural Collaborative Filtering approach to model and predict normal mobility. Our method is designed to model users' daily patterns of life without requiring prior knowledge, thereby enhancing performance in scenarios where data is sparse or incomplete, such as in cold start situations. Our algorithm consists of two main modules. The first is the collaborative filtering module, which applies collaborative filtering to model normal mobility of individual humans to places of interest. The second is the neural module, responsible for interpreting the complex spatio-temporal relationships inherent in human trajectory data. To validate our approach, we conducted extensive experiments using simulated and real-world datasets comparing to numerous state-of-the-art trajectory anomaly detection approaches.

Lance Kennedy, Andreas Züfle

Historically, much of the research in understanding, modeling, and mining human trajectory data has focused on where an individual stays. Thus, the focus of existing research has been on where a user goes. On the other hand, the study of how a user moves between locations has great potential for new research opportunities. Kinematic features describe how an individual moves between locations and can be used for tasks such as identification of individuals or anomaly detection. Unfortunately, data availability and quality challenges make kinematic trajectory mining difficult. In this paper, we leverage the Geolife dataset of human trajectories to investigate the viability of using kinematic features to identify individuals and detect anomalies. We show that humans have an individual "kinematic profile" which can be used as a strong signal to identify individual humans. We experimentally show that, for the two use-cases of individual identification and anomaly detection, simple kinematic features fed to standard classification and anomaly detection algorithms significantly improve results.

Yueyang Liu, Lance Kennedy, Ruochen Kong et al.

Individual-level human mobility prediction has emerged as a significant topic of research with applications in infectious disease monitoring, child, and elderly care. Existing studies predominantly focus on the microscopic aspects of human trajectories: such as predicting short-term trajectories or the next location visited, while offering limited attention to macro-level mobility patterns and the corresponding life routines. In this paper, we focus on an underexplored problem in human mobility prediction: determining the best practices to train a machine learning model using historical data to forecast an individuals complete trajectory over the next days and weeks. In this experiment paper, we undertake a comprehensive experimental analysis of diverse models, parameter configurations, and training strategies, accompanied by an in-depth examination of the statistical distribution inherent in human mobility patterns. Our empirical evaluations encompass both Long Short-Term Memory and Transformer-based architectures, and further investigate how incorporating individual life patterns can enhance the effectiveness of the prediction. We show that explicitly including semantic information such as day-of-the-week and user-specific historical information can help the model better understand individual patterns of life and improve predictions. Moreover, since the absence of explicit user information is often missing due to user privacy, we show that the sampling of users may exacerbate data skewness and result in a substantial loss in predictive accuracy. To mitigate data imbalance and preserve diversity, we apply user semantic clustering with stratified sampling to ensure that the sampled dataset remains representative. Our results further show that small-batch stochastic gradient optimization improves model performance, especially when human mobility training data is limited.