A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Commuting Origin-Destination Flow Generation

Commuting Origin-Destination (OD) flows are critical inputs for urban planning and transportation, providing crucial information about the population residing in one region and working in another within an interested area. Due to the high cost of data collection, researchers have developed physical and computational models to generate commuting OD flows using readily available urban attributes, such as sociodemographics and points of interest, for cities lacking historical OD flows -commuting OD flow generation. Existing works developed models based on different techniques and achieved improvement on different datasets with different evaluation metrics, which hinderes establishing a unified standard for comparing model performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce a large-scale dataset containing commuting OD flows for 3,333 areas including a wide range of urban environments around the United States. Based on that, we benchmark widely used models for commuting OD flow generation. We surprisingly find that the networkbased generative models achieve the optimal performance in terms of both precision and generalization ability, which may inspire new research directions of graph generative modeling in this field. The dataset and benchmark are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/CommutingODGen-Dataset .