DeepAGS: Deep learning with activity, geography and sequential information in predicting an individual's next trip destination

Individual mobility is driven by activities and thus restricted geographically, especially for trip destination prediction in public transport. Existing statistical learning based models focus on extracting mobility regularity in predicting an individual's mobility. However, they are limited in modeling varied spatial mobility patterns driven by the same activity (e.g. an individual may travel to different locations for shopping). The paper proposes a deep learning model with activity, geographic and sequential (DeepAGS) information in predicting an individual's next trip destination in public transport. DeepAGS models the semantic features of activity and geography by using word embedding and graph convolutional network. An adaptive neural fusion gate mechanism is proposed to dynamically fuse the mobility activity and geographical information given the current trip information. Besides, DeepAGS uses the gated recurrent unit to capture the temporal mobility regularity. The approach is validated by using a real-world smartcard dataset in urban railway systems and comparing with state-of-the-art models. The results show that the proposed model outperforms its peers in terms of accuracy and robustness by effectively integrating the activity and geographical information relevant to a trip context. Also, we illustrate and verify the working mechanism of the DeepAGS model using the synthetic data constructed using real-world data. The DeepAGS model captures both the activity and geographic information of hidden mobility activities and thus could be potentially applicable to other mobility prediction tasks, such as bus trip destinations and individual GPS locations.