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Learning periodic human behaviour models from sparse data for crowdsourcing aid delivery in developing countries

Learning periodic human behaviour models from sparse data for crowdsourcing aid delivery in developing countries
Learning periodic human behaviour models from sparse data for crowdsourcing aid delivery in developing countries
In many developing countries, half the population lives in rural locations, where access to essentials such as school materials, mosquito nets, and medical supplies is restricted. We propose an alternative method of distribution (to standard road delivery) in which the existing mobility habits of a local population are leveraged to deliver aid, which raises two technical challenges in the areas optimisation and learning. For optimisation, a standard Markov decision process applied to this problem is intractable, so we provide an exact formulation that takes advantage of the periodicities in human location behaviour. To learn such behaviour models from sparse data (i.e., cell tower observations), we develop a Bayesian model of human mobility. Using real cell tower data of the mobility behaviour of 50,000 individuals in Ivory Coast, we find that our model outperforms the state of the art approaches in mobility prediction by at least 25% (in held-out data likelihood). Furthermore, when incorporating mobility prediction with our MDP approach, we find a 81.3% reduction in total delivery time versus routine planning that minimises just the number of participants in the solution path.
978-0-9749039-9-6
401-410
McInerney, James
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Rogers, Alex
f9130bc6-da32-474e-9fab-6c6cb8077fdc
Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
McInerney, James
d473987b-b706-43f5-a0a7-5e3d36fa945c
Rogers, Alex
f9130bc6-da32-474e-9fab-6c6cb8077fdc
Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30

McInerney, James, Rogers, Alex and Jennings, Nicholas R. (2013) Learning periodic human behaviour models from sparse data for crowdsourcing aid delivery in developing countries. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Bellevue, United States. 11 - 15 Jul 2013. pp. 401-410 .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

In many developing countries, half the population lives in rural locations, where access to essentials such as school materials, mosquito nets, and medical supplies is restricted. We propose an alternative method of distribution (to standard road delivery) in which the existing mobility habits of a local population are leveraged to deliver aid, which raises two technical challenges in the areas optimisation and learning. For optimisation, a standard Markov decision process applied to this problem is intractable, so we provide an exact formulation that takes advantage of the periodicities in human location behaviour. To learn such behaviour models from sparse data (i.e., cell tower observations), we develop a Bayesian model of human mobility. Using real cell tower data of the mobility behaviour of 50,000 individuals in Ivory Coast, we find that our model outperforms the state of the art approaches in mobility prediction by at least 25% (in held-out data likelihood). Furthermore, when incorporating mobility prediction with our MDP approach, we find a 81.3% reduction in total delivery time versus routine planning that minimises just the number of participants in the solution path.

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Published date: 11 July 2013
Venue - Dates: Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Bellevue, United States, 2013-07-11 - 2013-07-15
Organisations: Electronics & Computer Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 352319
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/352319
ISBN: 978-0-9749039-9-6
PURE UUID: 93f5ae40-cce1-40cb-9164-f5bf7ac32319

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Date deposited: 09 May 2013 14:27
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 13:50

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Contributors

Author: James McInerney
Author: Alex Rogers
Author: Nicholas R. Jennings

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