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?:abstract
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Agent-based models (ABM) play a prominent role in guiding critical decision-making and supporting the development of effective policies for better urban resilience and response to the COVID-19 pandemic However, many ABMs lack realistic representations of human mobility, a key process that leads to physical interaction and subsequent spread of disease Therefore, we propose the application of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling technique, to foot-traffic data to develop a realistic model of human mobility in an ABM that simulates the spread of COVID-19 In our novel approach, LDA treats POIs as \'words\'and agent home census block groups (CBGs) as \'documents\'to extract \'topics\'of POIs that frequently appear together in CBG visits These topics allow us to simulate agent mobility based on the LDA topic distribution of their home CBG We compare the LDA based mobility model with competitor approaches including a naive mobility model that assumes visits to POIs are random We find that the naive mobility model is unable to facilitate the spread of COVID-19 at all Using the LDA informed mobility model, we simulate the spread of COVID-19 and test the effect of changes to the number of topics, various parameters, and public health interventions By examining the simulated number of cases over time, we find that the number of topics does indeed impact disease spread dynamics, but only in terms of the outbreak\'s timing Further analysis of simulation results is needed to better understand the impact of topics on simulated COVID-19 spread This study contributes to strengthening human mobility representations in ABMs of disease spread © 2020 ACM
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