Predicting delay of commuting activities following frequently occurring disasters using location data from smartphones

Natural disasters that frequently occur, such as typhoons and earthquakes, heavily affect human activities in urban areas by causing severe congestion and economic loss. Predicting the delay in usual commuting activities of individuals following such disasters is crucial for managing urban systems. We propose a novel method that predicts such delay of individuals’ movements in several frequently occurring disasters using various types of features including the com-muters’ usual movement patterns, disaster information, and geospatial information of commuters’ locations. Our method predicts the irregularity of commuting activities in metropolitan Tokyo during several typhoons, and earthquakes, using Yahoo Japan’s GPS dataset of 1 million users. The results show that the irregularity of individuals’ movements are significantly more predictable than with previous models. Also, we are able to understand that commuters’ usual movement patterns, disaster intensity, and geospatial features including road density and population density are main factors that cause commuting delay following disasters.