WorldMove, a global open data for human mobility
Yuan Yuan, Yuheng Zhang, Jingtao Ding, Yong Li
TL;DR
WorldMove is introduced, a large-scale synthetic mobility dataset covering over 1,600 cities across 179 countries and 6 continents and lays a global foundation for scalable, privacy-preserving, and inclusive mobility research-empowering data-scarce regions and enabling universal access to human mobility insights.
Abstract
High-quality human mobility data is crucial for applications such as urban planning, transportation management, and public health, yet its collection is often hindered by privacy concerns and data scarcity-particularly in less-developed regions. To address this challenge, we introduce WorldMove, a large-scale synthetic mobility dataset covering over 1,600 cities across 179 countries and 6 continents. Our method leverages publicly available multi-source data, including gridded population distribution, point-of-interest (POI) maps, and commuting origin-destination (OD) flows-to generate realistic city-scale mobility trajectories using a diffusion-based generative model. The generation process involves defining city boundaries, collecting multi-source input features, and simulating individual-level movements that reflect plausible daily mobility behavior. Comprehensive validation demonstrates that the generated data closely aligns with real-world observations, both in terms of fine-grained individual mobility behavior and city-scale population flows. Alongside the pre-generated datasets, we release the trained model and a complete open-source pipeline, enabling researchers and practitioners to generate custom synthetic mobility data for any city worldwide. This work not only fills critical data gaps, but also lays a global foundation for scalable, privacy-preserving, and inclusive mobility research-empowering data-scarce regions and enabling universal access to human mobility insights.