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Social scientists have observed a number of irrational behaviours during emergency evacuations, caused by a range of possible cognitive biases. One such behaviour is herding - people following and trusting others to guide them, when they do not know where the nearest exit is. This behaviour may lead to safety under a knowledgeable leader, but can also lead to dead-ends. We present a method for the automatic early detection of herding behaviour to avoid suboptimal evacuations. The method comprises three steps: (i) people clusters identification during evacuation, (ii) collection of clusters' spatio-temporal information to extract features for describing cluster behaviour, and (iii) unsupervised learning classification of clusters' behaviour into 'benign' or 'harmful' herding. Results using a set of different detection scores show accuracies higher than baselines in identifying harmful behaviour; thus, laying the ground for timely irrational behaviour detection to increase the performance of emergency evacuation systems.
@InProceedings{amores_et_al:LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.1,
author = {Amores, David and Vasardani, Maria and Tanin, Egemen},
title = {{Early Detection of Herding Behaviour during Emergency Evacuations}},
booktitle = {10th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2018)},
pages = {1:1--1:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-083-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {114},
editor = {Winter, Stephan and Griffin, Amy and Sester, Monika},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.1},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-93293},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.1},
annote = {Keywords: spatio-temporal data, emergency evacuations, herding behaviour}
}