Contextual Conditional Models for Smartphone-based Human Mobility Prediction

Human behavior is often complex and context-dependent. This paper presents a general technique to exploit this "multidimensional" contextual variable for human mobility prediction. We use an ensemble method, in which we extract different mobility patterns with multiple models and then combine these models under a probabilistic framework. The key idea lies in the assumption that human mobility can be explained by several mobility patterns that depend on a subset of the contextual variables and these can be learned by a simple model. We showed how this idea can be applied to two specific online prediction tasks: what is the next place a user will visit? and how long will he stay in the current place?. Using smartphone data collected from 153 users during 17 months, we show the potential of our method in predicting human mobility in real life.