Can Compact Open-Weight Large Language Models Recover Mobility Events from Incomplete Trajectories? A Controlled Evaluation Using Air Trips

Overview & Synopsis

Incomplete mobility trajectories can obscure the observations needed to identify important travel events and their endpoints. This study evaluates whether compact, locally deployed large language models (LLMs) can recover missing mobility information from incomplete trajectories, using high-confidence air trips as a controlled test case, and whether more explicit prompts can compensate for the loss of endpoint evidence. Using nationwide location-based services (LBS) data from the United States in January 2022 and airport reference data, thirty high-confidence air trips were converted into three incomplete-trajectory conditions by removing observations near the origin airport, the destination airport, or both. Four prompt variants and two LLMs generated 720 requests, each using a two-stage procedure to identify the flight transition segment and then select the origin and destination airports. Exact transition accuracy is 9.2%, while origin and destination accuracy are 31.4% and 10.7%, respectively. Only 1.9% of requests recover both the rule-identified transition and the reference airport pair. The most explicit prompt produced the highest observed exact transition and exact airport-pair recovery rates. The study introduces a controlled endpoint-removal framework for evaluating recovery of discrete mobility events from incomplete trajectories, allowing failures to be examined by inference stage and helping analysts decide whether recovered information should be retained, independently verified, or left unresolved.