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arXiv · 2410.07352

Generating Origin-Destination Matrices in Neural Spatial Interaction Models

Ioannis Zachos·Mark Girolami·Theodoros Damoulas
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Abstract

Agent-based models (ABMs) are proliferating as decision-making tools across policy areas in transportation, economics, and epidemiology. In these models, a central object of interest is the discrete origin-destination matrix which captures spatial interactions and agent trip counts between locations. Existing approaches resort to continuous approximations of this matrix and subsequent ad-hoc discretisations in order to perform ABM simulation and calibration. This impedes conditioning on partially observed summary statistics, fails to explore the multimodal matrix distribution over a discrete combinatorial support, and incurs discretisation errors. To address these challenges, we introduce a computationally efficient framework that scales linearly with the number of origin-destination pairs, operates directly on the discrete combinatorial space, and learns the agents' trip intensity through a neural differential equation that embeds spatial interactions. Our approach outperforms the prior art in terms of reconstruction error and ground truth matrix coverage, at a fraction of the computational cost. We demonstrate these benefits in large-scale spatial mobility ABMs in Cambridge, UK and Washington, DC, USA.

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Ioannis Zachos, Mark Girolami, Theodoros Damoulas. 2024-10-09. Generating Origin-Destination Matrices in Neural Spatial Interaction Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07352

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