Comparing deep learning and statistical methods in forecasting crowd distribution from aggregated mobile phone data

Accurately forecasting how crowds of people are distributed in urban areas during daily activities is of key importance for the smart city vision and related applications. In this work we forecast the crowd density and distribution in an urban area by analyzing an aggregated mobile phone dataset. By comparing the forecasting performance of statistical and deep learning methods on the aggregated mobile data we show that each class of methods has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the forecasting scenario. However, for our time-series forecasting problem, deep learning methods are preferable when it comes to simplicity and immediacy of use, since they do not require a time-consuming model selection for each different cell. Deep learning approaches are also appropriate when aiming to reduce the maximum forecasting error. Statistical methods instead show their superiority in providing more precise forecasting results, but they require data domain knowledge and computationally expensive techniques in order to select the best parameters.