English

WorldMove, a global open data for human mobility

Social and Information Networks 2025-12-19 v2

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.10506,
  title  = {WorldMove, a global open data for human mobility},
  author = {Yuan Yuan and Yuheng Zhang and Jingtao Ding and Yong Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10506},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted by Scientific Data

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:58:04.942Z