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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.8

BERT4Traj: Transformer-Based Trajectory Reconstruction for Sparse Mobility Data

Authors: Hao Yang, Angela Yao, Christopher C. Whalen, and Gengchen Mai

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 346, 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025)

Abstract

Understanding human mobility is essential for applications in public health, transportation, and urban planning. However, mobility data often suffers from sparsity due to limitations in data collection methods, such as infrequent GPS sampling or call detail record (CDR) data that only capture locations during communication events. To address this challenge, we propose BERT4Traj, a transformer-based model that reconstructs complete mobility trajectories by predicting hidden visits in sparse movement sequences. Inspired by BERT’s masked language modeling objective and self-attention mechanisms, BERT4Traj leverages spatial embeddings, temporal embeddings, and contextual background features such as demographics and anchor points. We evaluate BERT4Traj on real-world CDR and GPS datasets collected in Kampala, Uganda, demonstrating that our approach significantly outperforms traditional models such as Markov Chains, KNN, RNNs, and LSTMs. Our results show that BERT4Traj effectively reconstructs detailed and continuous mobility trajectories, enhancing insights into human movement patterns.

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Hao Yang, Angela Yao, Christopher C. Whalen, and Gengchen Mai. BERT4Traj: Transformer-Based Trajectory Reconstruction for Sparse Mobility Data. In 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 346, pp. 8:1-8:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{yang_et_al:LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.8,
  author =	{Yang, Hao and Yao, Angela and Whalen, Christopher C. and Mai, Gengchen},
  title =	{{BERT4Traj: Transformer-Based Trajectory Reconstruction for Sparse Mobility Data}},
  booktitle =	{13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025)},
  pages =	{8:1--8:9},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-378-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{346},
  editor =	{Sila-Nowicka, Katarzyna and Moore, Antoni and O'Sullivan, David and Adams, Benjamin and Gahegan, Mark},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.8},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238373},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.8},
  annote =	{Keywords: Human Mobility, Trajectory Reconstruction, Deep Learning, CDR, GPS}
}

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BERT4Traj: Transformer-Based Trajectory Reconstruction for Sparse Mobility Data

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