Human mobility predictability concerns the best prediction performance attainable from a given target and input information, but its ground truth is not directly observable on real mobility data. We present BER-PEF, a Bayes-error-rate-based framework that converts BER estimation into mobility predictability estimation and provides a unified protocol for comparing estimators without observable ground truth. The framework maps symbolic sequences, numeric trajectories, contextual features, and learned representations into a common feature--label space, then evaluates estimator outputs along controlled perturbation curves against a shared predictability reference interval by measuring deviations below the interval, above the interval, and across the full interval. Experiments on Foursquare NYC and TKY, GeoLife, and T-Drive show that several BER-based estimators achieve lower reference discrepancy than existing predictability methods on symbolic sequences and numeric trajectories, while their estimates track changes in empirical prediction performance under perturbation. Additional analyses show that contextual inputs and multiple structured representations can be evaluated under the same protocol, and that aggregating evidence across multiple perturbation levels provides a more reliable basis for estimator selection than relying on a single unperturbed observation. BER-PEF therefore offers a unified and verifiable path for evaluating predictability estimators on heterogeneous mobility data when ground-truth predictability is unavailable.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Problem setting for unified human mobility predictability evaluation. Existing methods are difficult to compare on real heterogeneous mobility data because predictability ground truth is unavailable and method assumptions differ across data forms.
Fig. 2: Overview of BER-PEF. A common representation layer supports symbolic and numeric mobility inputs; a bound-estimation layer applies BER estimators under controlled perturbations; and an area-evaluation layer compares estimated curves with a shared predictability reference interval.
Fig. 3: Unified representation module in BER-PEF. Symbolic, numeric, and contextual inputs are adapted to a shared sequence encoder; temporal aggregation and projection produce the sample representation used with its target label for BER estimation.
Dataset
Data form
Task
Train/Test samples
C
aDSOTA
Foursquare NYC
Symbolic
Next location
12,780 / 1,801
497
0.6130
Foursquare TKY
Symbolic
Next location
13,967 / 2,076
466
0.6267
GeoLife
Numeric
Next state
38,656 / 4,804
200
0.7161
T-Drive
Numeric
Next state
38,315 / 4,930
200
0.4254
TABLE I: Dataset statistics and task settings.
Fig. 4: Upper-side discrepancy of existing predictability methods and the top-three BER-PEF estimators selected by mean Total across the two datasets within each data form. The left and right panels compare symbolic sequences and numeric trajectories on a shared UD scale; lower values indicate closer agreement with the upper-side reference.
Fig. 5: Predictability estimation curves on symbolic mobility sequences.
Fig. 6: Predictability estimation curves on numeric trajectories.
Fig. 7: Calibration of predictability estimates to the empirical best-of-three Acc@1 proxy on Foursquare NYC and TKY. The proxy is the highest Acc@1 among Linear-Ngram, SeqMLP , and UniMob for each aligned task; markers denote task instances, solid lines are OLS fits, and the dashed diagonal denotes exact calibration.
Method
NYC
TKY
GeoLife
T-Drive
Macro
BER-kNN
0.011425
0.007166
0.038392
0.020209
0.019298
Random Forest
0.042541
0.050979
0.014776
0.011487
0.029946
5NN
0.025412
0.046203
0.033993
0.028093
0.033425
1NN
0.080835
0.092718
0.107983
0.100166
0.095425
Extra Trees
0.078817
0.090575
0.224830
0.016176
0.102600
Logistic
0.002952
0.014387
0.445108
0.303181
0.191407
TABLE II: Mean absolute gap to the empirical best-of-family benchmark across four mobility datasets (lower is better).
Fig. 8: Comparison with the empirical best-of-family benchmark: (a) dataset-balanced mean absolute gap for BER-kNN and the seven prediction algorithms shared by all datasets; (b–e) mean perturbation curves on Foursquare NYC, Foursquare TKY, GeoLife, and T-Drive. Error bars in (a) and shading for the benchmark and BER-kNN in (b–e) denote 95% CIs over ten realizations.
Fig. 9: Estimator-selection reliability of multi-point area evaluation. (a) Held-out regret for Origin-only and the fixed eight-point protocol (lower is better); (b) pooled top-1 recovery and pairwise ordering accuracy, with 95% hierarchical bootstrap intervals for the protocol difference; (c) subset regret distributions for one to eight observation points.
Fig. 10: Context information and estimator quality on NYC and TKY. (a) Empirical Acc@1 under baseline, time, category, and time-plus-category inputs (higher is better); (b) LD of context-aware predictability methods; (c) LD of the BER estimator family. The two LD panels share one color scale, and lower values are better.
Fig. 11: Representation quality on NYC/TKY symbolic mobility sequences. (a)–(b) Acc@1 and Acc@10 under the same supervised protocol; (c) Hit@10 for cosine retrieval with test queries and a training-set gallery. Higher values are better, and all source values are annotated.
Fig. 12: Lowest discrepancy attainable by the predefined core BER family under different representations (lower is better). (a) Cross-form best Total for symbolic, numeric, and fixed time-plus-category context inputs; (b)–(c) best LD and best UD for five symbolic representations. Each value is optimized only within {1NN(k=3),kNN,kNN-LOO} , and Total comes from one estimator.
Fig. 13: Upper-side discrepancy obtained by varying the SOTA-accuracy reference while keeping estimator outputs fixed. The horizontal axis is the SOTA factor, and lower values indicate closer agreement with the upper-side reference.
Individual-level mobility prediction is central to urban simulation, transportation planning, and policy analysis. Supervised sequence models achieve strong accuracy but require task-specific training and offer limited decision-level transparency. Recent LLM-based methods improve interpretability, yet mostly rely on static prompts and single-pass inference, limiting their ability to seek additional evidence when mobility signals are weak or conflicting. We propose \method{}, a training-free LLM-driven agent framework that formulates next-location prediction as adaptive evidence-controlled decision making. \method{} resolves routine cases through a fast path based on historical regularity, while ambiguous cases trigger iterative tool use over recent trajectories, historical behavior, stay-move likelihood, and geographical evidence. Across three mobility datasets, AgentMob achieves the strongest overall performance among training-free LLM-based methods, with GPT-5.4 reaching 71.42% Acc@1 on BW, 33.14% on YJMob100K, and 33.50% on Shanghai ISP. On BW non-fast-path cases, the LLM controller improves Acc@1 from 30.65% to 48.62% over a same-tool statistical baseline, showing that its main benefit lies in resolving ambiguous predictions through adaptive evidence gathering. Our code is available at https://github.com/Unknown-zoo/AgentMob.
Linyao Chen, Qinlao Zhao, Zechen Li +7
The University of Tokyo · Huazhong University of Science and Technology · University of New South Wales, Sydney +3
Human mobility prediction models, which forecast the next location in a user's trajectory, are increasingly deployed in urban analytics, navigation, and personalized services. Yet, little is known about their potential to memorize and expose sensitive user trajectories from training data. While memorization has been extensively studied in language models, mobility prediction poses unique challenges: training sequences encode human behavior at various spatial and temporal scales, creating privacy risks at different granularities. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic audit of memorization in mobility prediction models. While prior work has shown that privacy leaks can arise from such models, we systematically assess and quantify memorization risks at scale. We identify key challenges, including the lack of a randomness space, the multi-scale structure of trajectories, and user-specific behavioral diversity. To address these challenges, we introduce a framework to quantify mobility memorization at different levels of granularity: individual locations, anchor pairs, and subtrajectory segments. We also develop user-grounded reference sets to assess how likely a model is to prefer training data over realistic alternatives. Our evaluation across multiple models and datasets reveals pervasive memorization patterns that correlate with user regularity and increase the risk of data extraction at inference time. Our findings call for mandatory privacy auditing in mobility prediction models.
Anne Josiane Kouam, Hristo Boyadzhiev, Konrad Rieck
Inria & TU Berlin Palaiseau, France · BIFOLD & TU Berlin Berlin, Germany
Human mobility prediction is a critical task but remains challenging due to its complexity and variability across populations and regions. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made progress in zero-shot prediction, but existing methods suffer from limited interpretability (due to black-box reasoning), lack of iterative learning from new data, and poor transferability. In this paper, we introduce ARMove, a fully transferable framework for predicting human mobility through agentic reasoning. To address these limitations, ARMove employs standardized feature management with iterative optimization and user-specific customization: four major feature pools for foundational knowledge, user profiles for segmentation, and an automated generation mechanism integrating LLM knowledge. Robust generalization is achieved via agentic decision-making that adjusts feature weights to maximize accuracy while providing interpretable decision paths. Finally, large-small model synergy distills strategies from large LLMs (e.g., 72B) to smaller ones (e.g., 7B), reducing costs and enhancing performance ceilings. Extensive experiments on four global datasets show ARMove outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on 6 out of 12 metrics (gains of 0.78% to 10.47%), with transferability tests confirming robustness across regions, users, and scales. The other 4 items also achieved suboptimal results. Transferability tests confirm its 19 robustness across regions, user groups, and model scales, while interpretability 20 analysis highlights its transparency in decision-making. Our codes are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ARMove-F847.