Causality-Aware Next Location Prediction Framework based on Human Mobility Stratification

Human mobility data are fused with multiple travel patterns and hidden spatiotemporal patterns are extracted by integrating user, location, and time information to improve next location prediction accuracy. In existing next location prediction methods, different causal relationships that result from patterns in human mobility data are ignored, which leads to confounding information that can have a negative effect on predictions. Therefore, this study introduces a causality-aware framework for next location prediction, focusing on human mobility stratification for travel patterns. In our research, a novel causal graph is developed that describes the relationships between various input variables. We use counterfactuals to enhance the indirect effects in our causal graph for specific travel patterns: non-anchor targeted travels. The proposed framework is designed as a plug-and-play module that integrates multiple next location prediction paradigms. We tested our proposed framework using several state-of-the-art models and human mobility datasets, and the results reveal that the proposed module improves the prediction performance. In addition, we provide results from the ablation study and quantitative study to demonstrate the soundness of our causal graph and its ability to further enhance the interpretability of the current next location prediction models.