scikit-mobility: a Python library for the analysis, generation and risk assessment of mobility data

Pappalardo L., Simini F., Barlacchi G., Pellungrini R.

Human mobility  Python  Scientific software  Data science 

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of massive mobility data sets, such as tracks generated by GPS devices, call detail records, and geo-tagged posts from social media platforms. These data sets have fostered a vast scientific production on various applications of human mobility analysis, ranging from computational epidemiology to urban planning and transportation engineering. A strand of literature addresses data cleaning issues related to raw spatiotemporal trajectories, while the second line of research focuses on discovering the statistical "laws" that govern human movements. A significant effort has also been put on designing algorithms to generate synthetic trajectories able to reproduce, realistically, the laws of human mobility. Last but not least, a line of research addresses the crucial problem of privacy, proposing techniques to perform the re-identification of individuals in a database. Despite the increasing importance of human mobility analysis for many scientific and industrial domains, a view on state of the art cannot avoid noticing that there is no statistical software that can support scientists and practitioners with all the aspects mentioned above of mobility data analysis. To fill this gap, we propose scikit-mobility, a Python library that has the ambition of providing an environment to reproduce existing research, analyze mobility data, and simulate human mobility habits. scikit-mobility is efficient and easy to use as it extends the well-known standard pandas, a popular Python library for data analysis. Moreover, scikit-mobility provides the user with many functionalities, from visualizing trajectories to generating synthetic data, from analyzing the statistical patterns of trajectories to assessing the privacy risk related to the analysis of mobility data sets.