CoBAD: Modeling Collective Behaviors for Human Mobility Anomaly Detection

Detecting anomalies in human mobility is essential for applications such as public safety and urban planning. While traditional anomaly detection methods primarily focus on individual movement patterns (e.g., a child should stay at home at night), collective anomaly detection aims to identify irregularities in collective mobility behaviors across individuals (e.g., a child is at home alone while the parents are elsewhere) and remains an underexplored challenge. Unlike individual anomalies, collective anomalies require modeling spatiotemporal dependencies between individuals, introducing additional complexity. To address this gap, we propose CoBAD, a novel model designed to capture Collective Behaviors for human mobility Anomaly Detection. We first formulate the problem as unsupervised learning over Collective Event Sequences (CES) with a co-occurrence event graph, where CES represents the event sequences of related individuals. CoBAD then employs a two-stage attention mechanism to model both the individual mobility patterns and the interactions across multiple individuals. Pre-trained on large-scale collective behavior data through masked event and link reconstruction tasks, CoBAD is able to detect two types of collective anomalies: unexpected co-occurrence anomalies and absence anomalies, the latter of which has been largely overlooked in prior work. Extensive experiments on large-scale mobility datasets demonstrate that CoBAD significantly outperforms existing anomaly detection baselines, achieving an improvement of 13%-18% in AUCROC and 19%-70% in AUCPR. All source code is available at https://github.com/wenhaomin/CoBAD.