Deep Activity Model: A Generative Deep Learning Approach for Human Mobility Pattern Synthesis

Human mobility plays a crucial role in transportation, urban planning, and public health, but current approaches face important limitations. Existing deep learning models tend to overlook the semantic interdependencies among activities and households and rely on restricted GPS data, while activity-based models depend on rigid assumptions and extensive data, making them costly and difficult to adapt to new regions, especially those with limited conventional travel data. We propose a generative Transformer model that uses socio-demographic and household attributes to synthesize daily activity chains, with a location module assigning spatial zones to produce complete daily trajectories. To address these limitations, we propose a generative Transformer model that uses socio-demographic and household attributes to synthesize daily activity chains, with a location module assigning spatial zones to produce complete daily trajectories. Trained on open-source and widely available household travel survey data and then fine-tuned with local data, the model captures national activity patterns and transfers effectively to California, Washington, and Mexico City. This approach offers significant potential for advancing synthetic human mobility modeling and provides urban planners and policymakers with improved tools for simulating transportation systems and supporting decisions in urban development and public health. Its practical utility is demonstrated through large-scale traffic simulations in Los Angeles County. Compared to the SCAG Activity-Based Model (ABM), the proposed method produces consistent spatial demand patterns, achieving an activity location cosine similarity of 0.997 and a network-level vehicle-miles-traveled Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 4.97%. Compared to real-world observations from Caltrans PeMS, the simulated traffic achieves MAPE of 5.85% for traffic volume and 4.36% for speed on California’s I-405 corridor. This demonstrates the practicality of learning-based synthetic mobility for regional simulation and planning.