Predicting a Person’s Next Activity Region with a Dynamic Region-Relation-Aware Graph Neural Network

The understanding of people’s inter-regional mobility behaviors, such as predicting the next activity region (AR) or uncovering the intentions for regional mobility, is of great value to public administration or business interests. While there are numerous studies on human mobility, these studies are mainly from a statistical view or study movement behaviors within a region. The work on individual-level inter-regional mobility behavior is limited. To this end, in this article, we propose a dynamic region-relation-aware graph neural network (DRRGNN) for exploring individual mobility behaviors over ARs. Specifically, we aim at developing models that can answer three questions: (1) Which regions are the ARs? (2) Which region will be the next AR, and (3) Why do people make this regional mobility? To achieve these tasks, we first propose a method to find out people’s ARs. Then, the designed model integrates a dynamic graph convolution network (DGCN) and a recurrent neural network (RNN) to depict the evolution of relations between ARs and mine the regional mobility patterns. In the learning process, the model further considers peoples’ profiles and visited point-of-interest (POIs). Finally, extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that the proposed model can significantly improve accuracy for both the next AR prediction and mobility intention prediction.