LSTM-Based Deep Learning Model for Predicting Individual Mobility Traces of Short-Term Foreign Tourists

The increasing availability of trajectory recordings has led to the mining of a massive amount of historical track data, allowing for a better understanding of travel behaviors by revealing meaningful motion patterns. In the context of human mobility analysis, the problem of motion prediction assumes a central role and is beneficial for a wide range of applications, including for touristic purposes, such as personalized services or targeted recommendations, and sustainability studies related to crowd management and resource redistribution. This paper tackles a particular case of the trajectory prediction problem, focusing on large-scale mobility traces of short-term foreign tourists. These sparse trajectories, short and non-repetitive, lack spatial and temporal regularity, making prediction analysis based on individual historical motion data unreliable. To face this issue, we hereby propose a deep learning-based approach, taking into account the collective mobility of tourists over the territory. The underlying semantics of motion patterns are captured by means of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network model trained on pre-processed location sequences, aiming to predict the next visited place in the trajectory. We tested the methodology on a real-world big dataset, demonstrating its higher feasibility with respect to traditional approaches.