WorldMove, a global open data for human mobility
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Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2025.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
4 papers.
- 2025Massive-STEPS: Massive Semantic Trajectories for Understanding POI Check-ins -- Dataset and Benchmarkscited by 3
- 2025UniMove: A Unified Model for Multi-city Human Mobility Predictioncited by 2
- 2025Breaking Data Silos: Towards Open and Scalable Mobility Foundation Models via Generative Continual Learningcited by 1
- 2026Encounter-Driven City-Scale Human Mobility Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Encounter-Driven City-Scale Human Mobility Generation with Large Language Models13 Oct 2026
- 2025UniMove: A Unified Model for Multi-city Human Mobility Prediction9 Aug 2025
- 2025Breaking Data Silos: Towards Open and Scalable Mobility Foundation Models via Generative Continual Learning7 Jun 2025
- 2025Massive-STEPS: Massive Semantic Trajectories for Understanding POI Check-ins -- Dataset and Benchmarks16 May 2025