Into the Unknown: Applying Inductive Spatial-Semantic Location Embeddings for Predicting Individuals' Mobility Beyond Visited Places
This work addresses a core task in human mobility modelling with implications for urban planning and personalised services, but it is incremental as it builds on existing representation learning methods.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting individuals' next locations by addressing limitations of traditional location embeddings, such as inability to encode explicit spatial information and handle unseen locations, and demonstrated that CaLLiPer, a multimodal inductive embedding framework, consistently outperforms baselines, particularly in inductive scenarios with emerging locations.
Predicting individuals' next locations is a core task in human mobility modelling, with wide-ranging implications for urban planning, transportation, public policy and personalised mobility services. Traditional approaches largely depend on location embeddings learned from historical mobility patterns, limiting their ability to encode explicit spatial information, integrate rich urban semantic context, and accommodate previously unseen locations. To address these challenges, we explore the application of CaLLiPer -- a multimodal representation learning framework that fuses spatial coordinates and semantic features of points of interest through contrastive learning -- for location embedding in individual mobility prediction. CaLLiPer's embeddings are spatially explicit, semantically enriched, and inductive by design, enabling robust prediction performance even in scenarios involving emerging locations. Through extensive experiments on four public mobility datasets under both conventional and inductive settings, we demonstrate that CaLLiPer consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly excelling in inductive scenarios. Our findings highlight the potential of multimodal, inductive location embeddings to advance the capabilities of human mobility prediction systems. We also release the code and data (https://github.com/xlwang233/Into-the-Unknown) to foster reproducibility and future research.