GeoGail: A Model-Based Imitation Learning Framework for Human Trajectory Synthesizing

Synthesized human trajectories are crucial for a large number of applications. Existing solutions are mainly based on the generative adversarial network (GAN), which is limited due to the lack of modeling the human decision-making process. In this article, we propose a novel imitation learning-based method to synthesize human trajectories. This model utilizes a novel semantics-based interaction mechanism between the decision-making strategy and visitations to diverse geographical locations to model them in the semantic domain in a uniform manner. To augment the modeling ability to the real-world human decision-making policy, we propose a feature extraction model to extract the internal latent factors of variation of different individuals and then propose a novel self-attention-based policy net to capture the long-term correlation of mobility and decision-making patterns. Then, to better reward users’ mobility behavior, we propose a novel multi-scale reward net combined with mutual information to model the instant reward, long-term reward, and individual characteristics in a cohesive manner. Extensive experimental results on two real-world trajectory datasets show that our proposed model can synthesize the most high-quality trajectory data compared with six state-of-the-art baselines in terms of a number of key usability metrics and can well support practical applications based on trajectory data, demonstrating its effectiveness. Furthermore, our proposed method can learn explainable knowledge automatically from data, including explainable statistical features of trajectories and statistical relation between decision-making policy and features.