  Predicting human mobility patterns has many practical applications in urban
planning, traffic engineering, infectious disease epidemiology, emergency
management and location-based services. Developing a universal model capable of
accurately predicting the mobility fluxes between locations is a fundamental
and challenging problem in regional economics and transportation science. Here,
we propose a new parameter-free model named opportunity priority selection
model as an alternative in human mobility prediction. The basic assumption of
the model is that an individual will select destination locations that present
higher opportunity benefits than the location opportunities of the origin and
the intervening opportunities between the origin and destination. We use real
mobility data collected from a number of cities and countries to demonstrate
the predictive ability of this simple model. The results show that the new
model offers universal predictions of intracity and intercity mobility patterns
that are consistent with real observations, thus suggesting that the proposed
model better captures the mechanism underlying human mobility than previous
models.
