CIML4MOB: Causally informed machine learning for individual mobility dynamics

Period
January 2025 – December 2026

Objective
The project envisions a mobile cyber-physical system where people carrying mobile sensors (e.g., smartphones, smartcards) generate large amounts of trajectory data that is used to sense and monitor human interactions with physical and social environments. Built upon the static causal inference results in the cAIMBER project, the CIML4MOB project aims to build causally informed machine learning models for predicting adoption time of individuals and subpopulations and their risks of attrition by input dates. Such dynamic causal models may then drive policy design strategies for lasting behavioral changes (the ultimate purpose of behavior interventions).

Background
The ever-changing mobility landscape and climate change continue to challenge existing operating models and the responsiveness of city planners, policymakers, and regulators. City authorities have growing investment needs that require more focused operations and management strategies that align mobility portfolios to societal goals. The project targets the root cause of traffic (human) and proposes causally informed machine learning to learn and predict human mobility dynamics from pervasive mobile sensing data that helps cities meet both sustainability challenges and improve urban resilience to disruptive events.

The human mobility dynamic problem is defined to predict travel choice decisions given a set of factors, including for example individual traits, travel contexts, and interventions. The research pair project (cAIMBER, 2022-2024) developed the data-driven causal inference method to discover the static causal graph of behavior responses to interventions in public transport. The cAIMBER causal model allows for analysis and prediction of human behavior based on population features, but without regard to when individuals or other subpopulations will adopt the desired behavior of a certain incentivization program. From the perspective of city planning and utility costs, two fundamental questions are (1) how to incentivize early adoption of the desired behavioral shift (adoption time) and (2) given an individual has shifted their behavior, how to prevent reversion to baseline behavior (attrition time). The research consolidator project, CIML4MOB, aims to build upon cAIMBER results to build causally informed machine learning models for predicting adoption time of individuals and subpopulations and their risks of attrition by input dates.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The research collaborates between researchers in transportation science and mathematics at KTH.