Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility

Predictable Travel Routines While people rarely perceive their actions to be random, current models of human activity are fundamentally stochastic. Processes that rely on human mobility patterns, like the prediction of new epidemics, traffic engineering, or city planning, could benefit from highly accurate predictive models. To investigate the predictability of human dynamics, Song et al. (p. 1018 ) used the recorded trajectories of millions of mobile phone users, collected by mobile phone companies and anonymized for research purposes. They hypothesized that given the wide range of travel patterns that different users follow, there would be significant differences between their predictability as well: Users…