Do simulated agents move like real people?

Abstract

Human mobility is increasingly represented using synthetic populations that offer scalable alternatives when individual-level observations are unavailable or sensitive. Yet validation typically emphasizes aggregate statistics, which can obscure whether simulated agents traverse transportation networks in ways that resemble real travelers. Here, we develop a path-centric framework that combines direct path-level comparisons with higher-order network models to compare observed and simulated mobility on a shared metropolitan road network. Observed and simulated paths share broad statistical regularities and short-range memory. Beyond these similarities, however, simulated mobility underrepresents long paths, exhibits greater redundancy among long route sequences, covers a smaller and partly different portion of the network, and is more predictable overall. These discrepancies show that agreement in aggregate mobility patterns does not imply fidelity in how travelers move through the underlying infrastructure. Higher-order path analysis therefore offers a framework for validating synthetic mobility at the spatial and sequential scales relevant to scientific inference, urban planning, and policy.