Human mobility modeling is a complex yet essential subject of study related to modeling important spatiotemporal events, including traffic, disease spreading, and customized directions and recommendations. While spatiotemporal data can be collected easily via smartphones, current state-of-the-art deep learning methods require vast amounts of such privacy-sensitive data to generate useful models. This work investigates the creation of spatiotemporal models using a Federated Learning (FL) approach—a machine learning technique that avoids sharing personal data with centralized servers. More specifically, we examine three centralized models for next-place prediction: a simple Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model, as well as two state-of-the-art centralized approaches, Flashback and DeepMove. Flashback is a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that utilizes historical hidden states with similar context as the current spatiotemporal context to improve performance. DeepMove is an attentional RNN that aims to capture human mobility's…
