WorldMove, a global open data for human mobility
By: Yuan Yuan , Yuheng Zhang , Jingtao Ding and more
Potential Business Impact:
Creates fake travel maps for cities worldwide.
High-quality human mobility data is crucial for applications such as urban planning, transportation management, and public health, yet its collection is often hindered by privacy concerns and data scarcity-particularly in less-developed regions. To address this challenge, we introduce WorldMove, a large-scale synthetic mobility dataset covering over 1,600 cities across 179 countries and 6 continents. Our method leverages publicly available multi-source data, including gridded population distribution, point-of-interest (POI) maps, and commuting origin-destination (OD) flows-to generate realistic city-scale mobility trajectories using a diffusion-based generative model. The generation process involves defining city boundaries, collecting multi-source input features, and simulating individual-level movements that reflect plausible daily mobility behavior. Comprehensive validation demonstrates that the generated data closely aligns with real-world observations, both in terms of fine-grained individual mobility behavior and city-scale population flows. Alongside the pre-generated datasets, we release the trained model and a complete open-source pipeline, enabling researchers and practitioners to generate custom synthetic mobility data for any city worldwide. This work not only fills critical data gaps, but also lays a global foundation for scalable, privacy-preserving, and inclusive mobility research-empowering data-scarce regions and enabling universal access to human mobility insights.
Similar Papers
Learning Universal Human Mobility Patterns with a Foundation Model for Cross-domain Data Fusion
Machine Learning (CS)
Helps cities plan roads and traffic better.
Deep Generative Model for Human Mobility Behavior
Physics and Society
Creates realistic travel plans for people.
Human Mobility Datasets Enriched With Contextual and Social Dimensions
Computation and Language
Maps where people go and what they do.