PhD Dissertation Defense by Larry LIN Junjie | Modeling Movement Decisions in Networks: A Discrete Choice Model Approach

Movement is part and parcel of everyday life. People move for multiple reasons, whether it's for getting from an origin to destination (e.g. home to workplace), or for livelihood purposes (e.g. taxi drivers in search of passengers). On top of that, movement can occur at different frequencies, whether its continuous movement in matter of seconds (when driving), to ad-hoc movement which requires a contemplation period of years (e.g. migration). In this dissertation defense, we propose a discrete choice model approach for modeling movement decisions of agents in a network environment. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach with concrete use cases in three problem domains (leisure, transportation, migration) under the interaction of data observability and model scale. The proposed approach paves the way for development of high quality agent-based models for capturing the movement decisions of agents in networks, and thereafter serving as evaluation tools for various recommendation systems and policies.

Larry LIN is a PhD candidate supervised by Associate Professor Cheng Shih-Fen and co-supervised by Professor Lau Hoong Chuin at the Singapore Management University. His research focuses on the modelling and optimization of complex systems across multiple domains (e.g. transportation, leisure). From August 2015 to May 2016, he did his overseas training residency at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Professor Kathleen M. Carley at the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS).