Where to Go Next Day: Multiscale Spatial–Temporal Decoupled Model for Mid-Term Human Mobility Prediction

Predicting individual mobility patterns is crucial across various applications. While current methods mainly focus on predicting the next location for personalized services like recommendations, they often fall short in supporting broader applications such as traffic management and epidemic control, which require longer period forecasts of human mobility. This study addresses mid-term mobility prediction, aiming to capture daily travel patterns and forecast trajectories for the upcoming day or week. We propose a novel multiscale spatial–temporal decoupled predictor (MSTDP) designed to efficiently extract spatial and temporal information by decoupling daily trajectories into distinct location-duration chains. Our approach employs a hierarchical encoder to model multiscale temporal patterns, including daily recurrence and weekly periodicity, and utilizes a transformer-based decoder to globally attend to predicted information in the location or duration chain. In addition, we introduce a spatial heterogeneous graph learner to capture multiscale spatial relationships, enhancing semantic-rich representations. Extensive experiments, including statistical physics analysis, are conducted on large-scale mobile phone records in five cities (Boston, Los Angeles, SF Bay Area, Shanghai, and Tokyo), to demonstrate MSTDP’s advantages. Applied to epidemic modeling in Boston, MSTDP significantly outperforms the best-performing baseline, achieving a remarkable 62.8% reduction in mean absolute error (MAE) for cumulative new cases.