The frequency and intensity of natural disasters has increased significantly in recent decades, and this trend is expected to continue. Hence, understanding and predicting human evacuation behavior and mobility will play a vital role in planning effective humanitarian relief, disaster management, and long-term societal reconstruction. However, existing models are shallow models, and it is difficult to apply them for understanding the “deep knowledge” of human mobility. Therefore, in this study, we collect big and heterogeneous data (e.g., GPS records of 1.6 million users over 3 years, data on earthquakes that have occurred in Japan over 4 years, news report data, and transportation network data), and we build an intelligent system, namely, DeepMob, for understanding and predicting human evacuation behavior and mobility following different types of natural disasters. The key component of DeepMob is based on a deep learning architecture that aims to understand the basic laws that govern human behavior and mobility following natural disasters, from big and heterogeneous data. Furthermore, based on the deep learning model, DeepMob can accurately predict or simulate a person’s future evacuation behaviors or evacuation routes under different disaster conditions. Experimental results and validations demonstrate the efficiency and superior performance of our system, and suggest that human mobility following disasters may be predicted and simulated more easily than previously thought.

Human movements are difficult to predict, especially, when we consider rare behaviors that deviate from normal daily routines. By tracing the behavior of a person over a long period, we can model their daily routines and predict periodical behaviors, whereas rare behaviors, such as participating in the New Year's Eve countdown, can hardly be predicted readily and thus they have usually been treated as outliers of the daily routines in most existing studies. However, for scenarios such as emergency management or intelligent traffic regulation, we are more interested in rare behaviors than daily routines. Using human mobility Big Data, the rare behavior of each individual in a social crowd is no longer rare and thus it may be predicted when we analyze the crowd behavior at a citywide level. Therefore in this study, instead of predicting movement based on daily routines, we make short-term predictions based on the recent movement observations. We propose a novel model called CityMomentum as a predicting-by-clustering framework for sampling future movement using a mixture of multiple random Markov chains, each of which is a Naive Movement Predictive model trained with the movements of the subjects that belong to each cluster. We apply our approach to a big mobile phone GPS log dataset and predict the short-term future movements, especially during the Comiket 80 and New Year's Eve celebration. We evaluate our prediction by a Earth Mover Distance (EMD) based metric, and show our approach accurately predicts the crowd behavior during the rare crowd events, which makes an early crowd event warning and regulation possible in the emergent situations.