Dimensionally Aware Multi-Objective Genetic Programming for Automatic Crowd Behavior Modeling

Abstract

One limitation of current data-driven automatic crowd modeling methods is that the models generated have low interpretability, which limits the practical applications of the models. In this article, we propose a new data-driven crowd modeling approach that can generate universal behavior rules with better interpretability. Higher interpretability helps people better understand and analyze the rules. Furthermore, the proposed approach considers both static and dynamic features during modeling to generate a realistic crowd, based on the assumption that humans tend to consider different features with respect to their states. In the proposed method, the automatic behavior rule generation problem is formulated as a symbolic regression problem. Then, the problem is solved by multi-objective genetic programming. On one hand, to improve the interpretability of the behavior rules found, a new mechanism is proposed to guide the algorithm to find concise and dimensionally consistent solutions. On the other hand, decisions made by considering static and dynamic features respectively are combined to improve the generated crowd realism. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, three real-world datasets are utilized for training and testing. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to find universal behavior rules that are competitive to previous work in accuracy while having better interpretability.