Multi-scale spatio-temporal analysis of human mobility
arXiv:1609.05514 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171686
Abstract
The recent availability of digital traces generated by phone calls and online logins has significantly increased the scientific understanding of human mobility. Until now, however, limited data resolution and coverage have hindered a coherent description of human displacements across different spatial and temporal scales. Here, we characterise mobility behaviour across several orders of magnitude by analysing ~850 individuals' digital traces sampled every ~16 seconds for 25 months with ~10 meters spatial resolution. We show that the distributions of distances and waiting times between consecutive locations are best described by log-normal distributions and that natural time-scales emerge from the regularity of human mobility. We point out that log-normal distributions also characterise the patterns of discovery of new places, implying that they are not a simple consequence of the routine of modern life.
References in corpus (8)
- Understanding individual human mobility patterns
- The scaling laws of human travel
- Small But Slow World: How Network Topology and Burstiness Slow Down Spreading
- Characterizing Human Mobility Patterns in a Large Street Network
- Effects of time window size and placement on the structure of aggregated networks
- The origin of power-law distributions in deterministic walks: the influence of landscape geometry
- Are human interactivity times lognormal?
- Clean up or mess up: the effect of sampling biases on measurements of degree distributions in mobile phone datasets