DeepFlowGen: Intention-Aware Fine Grained Crowd Flow Generation via Deep Neural Networks

Obtaining crowd flow distribution with recognized human intention is extremely valuable for a series of applications for metropolitan cities. Previous solutions look at spatial correlation and temporal periodicity based on historical crowd flow information to calculate future crowd flow distribution. However, these mechanisms cannot recognize the intention behind crowd flow. We address this problem by leveraging a key insight – people's intention behind their movement is highly correlated with the point-of-interest (POI) distribution of the corresponding regions and adjacent regions. Therefore, we propose DeepFlowGen to model the complicated relationship between crowd flow, POI, check-ins, and time to generate intention-aware crowd flow. Specifically, we solve the conflict between dynamic crowd flow and static POI distribution by fusing the information in both time and POI domains. Besides, we employ a sequence of residual blocks in DeepFlowGen to address the challenges of modeling the diverse temporal rhythms and heterogeneous influence of POI. Furthermore, we examine the generated intention-aware crowd flow from two aspects to substantiate the reasonability of DeepFlowGen. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions by at most 30 percent in terms of NRMSE of total crowd flow. Moreover, the correlation between the generated intention-aware crowd flow and the check-in distribution across different categories of POIs is as high as 0.90 and 0.80 in Beijing and Shanghai. Combined with extensive case studies, we demonstrate the strong ability of our model in generating intention-aware crowd flow.