Xiaojie Yang

Zipei Fan, Xiaojie Yang, Wei Yuan et al.

Knowing "what is happening" and "what will happen" of the mobility in a city is the building block of a data-driven smart city system. In recent years, mobility digital twin that makes a virtual replication of human mobility and predicting or simulating the fine-grained movements of the subjects in a virtual space at a metropolitan scale in near real-time has shown its great potential in modern urban intelligent systems. However, few studies have provided practical solutions. The main difficulties are four-folds. 1) The daily variation of human mobility is hard to model and predict; 2) the transportation network enforces a complex constraints on human mobility; 3) generating a rational fine-grained human trajectory is challenging for existing machine learning models; and 4) making a fine-grained prediction incurs high computational costs, which is challenging for an online system. Bearing these difficulties in mind, in this paper we propose a two-stage human mobility predictor that stratifies the coarse and fine-grained level predictions. In the first stage, to encode the daily variation of human mobility at a metropolitan level, we automatically extract citywide mobility trends as crowd contexts and predict long-term and long-distance movements at a coarse level. In the second stage, the coarse predictions are resolved to a fine-grained level via a probabilistic trajectory retrieval method, which offloads most of the heavy computations to the offline phase. We tested our method using a real-world mobile phone GPS dataset in the Kanto area in Japan, and achieved good prediction accuracy and a time efficiency of about 2 min in predicting future 1h movements of about 220K mobile phone users on a single machine to support more higher-level analysis of mobility prediction.

Xiaojie Yang, Dizhi Huang, Hangli Ge et al.

Accurate forecasting of daily attendance is vital for managing transportation, crowd flows, and services at large-scale international events such as Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan. However, existing approaches often rely on multi-source external data (such as weather, traffic, and social media) to improve accuracy, which can lead to unreliable results when historical data are insufficient. To address these challenges, we propose a Transformer-based framework that leverages reservation dynamics, i.e., ticket bookings and subsequent updates within a time window, as a proxy for visitors' attendance intentions, under the assumption that such intentions are eventually reflected in reservation patterns. This design avoids the complexity of multi-source integration while still capturing external influences like weather and promotions implicitly embedded in reservation dynamics. We construct a dataset combining entrance records and reservation dynamics and evaluate the model under both single-channel (total attendance) and two-channel (separated by East and West gates) settings. Results show that separately modeling East and West gates consistently improves accuracy, particularly for short- and medium-term horizons. Ablation studies further confirm the importance of the encoder-decoder structure, inverse-style embedding, and adaptive fusion module. Overall, our findings indicate that reservation dynamics offer a practical and informative foundation for attendance forecasting in large-scale international events.

Xiaojie Yang, Hangli Ge, Jiawei Wang et al.

Large-scale human mobility exhibits spatial and temporal patterns that can assist policymakers in decision making. Although traditional prediction models attempt to capture these patterns, they often interfered by non-periodic public events, such as disasters and occasional celebrations. Since regular human mobility patterns are heavily affected by these events, estimating their causal effects is critical to accurate mobility predictions. Although news articles provide unique perspectives on these events in an unstructured format, processing is a challenge. In this study, we propose a causality-augmented prediction model, called CausalMob, to analyze the causal effects of public events. We first utilize large language models (LLMs) to extract human intentions from news articles and transform them into features that act as causal treatments. Next, the model learns representations of spatio-temporal regional covariates from multiple data sources to serve as confounders for causal inference. Finally, we present a causal effect estimation framework to ensure event features remain independent of confounders during prediction. Based on large-scale real-world data, the experimental results show that the proposed model excels in human mobility prediction, outperforming state-of-the-art models.

Xiaojie Yang, Zipei Fan, Hangli Ge et al.

Human mobility data are fused with multiple travel patterns and hidden spatiotemporal patterns are extracted by integrating user, location, and time information to improve next location prediction accuracy. In existing next location prediction methods, different causal relationships that result from patterns in human mobility data are ignored, which leads to confounding information that can have a negative effect on predictions. Therefore, this study introduces a causality-aware framework for next location prediction, focusing on human mobility stratification for travel patterns. In our research, a novel causal graph is developed that describes the relationships between various input variables. We use counterfactuals to enhance the indirect effects in our causal graph for specific travel patterns: non-anchor targeted travels. The proposed framework is designed as a plug-and-play module that integrates multiple next location prediction paradigms. We tested our proposed framework using several state-of-the-art models and human mobility datasets, and the results reveal that the proposed module improves the prediction performance. In addition, we provide results from the ablation study and quantitative study to demonstrate the soundness of our causal graph and its ability to further enhance the interpretability of the current next location prediction models.

Hangli Ge, Xiaojie Yang, Itsuki Matsunaga et al.

Accurate traffic prediction, especially predicting traffic conditions several days in advance is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Such predictions enable mid- and long-term traffic optimization, which is crucial for efficient transportation planning. However, the inclusion of diverse external features, alongside the complexities of spatial relationships and temporal uncertainties, significantly increases the complexity of forecasting models. Additionally, traditional approaches have handled data preprocessing separately from the learning model, leading to inefficiencies caused by repeated trials of preprocessing and training. In this study, we propose a federated architecture capable of learning directly from raw data with varying features and time granularities or lengths. The model adopts a unified design that accommodates different feature types, time scales, and temporal periods. Our experiments focus on federating route search records and begin by processing raw data within the model framework. Unlike traditional models, this approach integrates the data federation phase into the learning process, enabling compatibility with various time frequencies and input/output configurations. The accuracy of the proposed model is demonstrated through evaluations using diverse learning patterns and parameter settings. The results show that online search log data is useful for forecasting long-term traffic, highlighting the model's adaptability and efficiency.