Back to Bayesics: Uncovering Human Mobility Distributions and Anomalies with an Integrated Statistical and Neural Framework

Existing methods for anomaly detection often fall short due to their inability to handle the complexity, heterogeneity, and high dimensionality inherent in real-world mobility data. In this paper, we propose DeepBayesic, a novel framework that integrates Bayesian principles with deep neural networks to model the underlying multivariate distributions from sparse and complex datasets. Unlike traditional models, DeepBayesic is designed to manage heterogeneous inputs, accommodating both continuous and categorical data to provide a more comprehensive understanding of mobility patterns. The framework features customized neural density estimators and hybrid architectures, allowing for flexibility in modeling diverse feature distributions and enabling the use of specialized neural networks tailored to different data types. Our approach also leverages agent embeddings for personalized anomaly detection, enhancing its ability to distinguish between normal and anomalous behaviors for individual agents. We evaluate our approach on several mobility datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods. Our results indicate that incorporating personalization and advanced sequence modeling techniques can substantially enhance the ability to detect subtle and complex anomalies in spatiotemporal event sequences.

NUMOSIM: A Synthetic Mobility Dataset with Anomaly Detection Benchmarks

Collecting real-world mobility data is challenging. It is often fraught with privacy concerns, logistical difficulties, and inherent biases. Moreover, accurately annotating anomalies in large-scale data is nearly impossible, as it demands meticulous effort to distinguish subtle and complex patterns. These challenges significantly impede progress in geospatial anomaly detection research by restricting access to reliable data and complicating the rigorous evaluation, comparison, and benchmarking of methodologies. To address these limitations, we introduce a synthetic mobility dataset, NUMOSIM, that provides a controlled, ethical, and diverse environment for benchmarking anomaly detection techniques. NUMOSIM simulates a wide array of realistic mobility scenarios, encompassing both typical and anomalous behaviours, generated through advanced deep learning models trained on real mobility data. This approach allows NUMOSIM to accurately replicate the complexities of real-world movement patterns while strategically injecting anomalies to challenge and evaluate detection algorithms based on how effectively they capture the interplay between demographic, geospatial, and temporal factors. Our goal is to advance geospatial mobility analysis by offering a realistic benchmark for improving anomaly detection and mobility modeling techniques. To support this, we provide open access to the NUMOSIM dataset, along with comprehensive documentation, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results.