Predictability of Irregular Human Mobility

Understanding human mobility is critical for decision support in areas from urban planning to infectious diseases control. Prior work has focused on tracking daily logs of outdoor mobility without considering relevant context, which contain a mixture of regular and irregular human movement for a range of purposes, and thus diverse e‚ects on the dynamics have been ignored. Œis study aims to focus on irregular human movement of di‚erent meta-populations with various purposes. We propose approaches to estimate the predictability of mobility in di‚erent contexts. With our survey data from international and domestic visitors to Australia, we found that the travel paŠerns of Europeans visiting for holidays are less predictable than those visiting for education, while East Asian visitors show the opposite paŠerns, i.e., more predictable for holidays than for education. Domestic residents from the most populous Australian states exhibit the most unpredictable paŠerns, while visitors from less populated states show the highest predictable movement.