James P. Bagrow, Yu-Ru Lin
The individual movements of large numbers of people are important in many
contexts, from urban planning to disease spreading. Datasets that capture human
mobility are now available and many interesting features have been discovered,
including the ultra-slow spatial growth of individual mobility. However, the
detailed substructures and spatiotemporal flows of mobility-the sets and
sequences of visited locations-have not been well studied. We show that
individual mobility is dominated by small groups of frequently visited,
dynamically close locations, forming primary "habitats" capturing typical daily
activity, along with subsidiary habitats representing additional travel. These
habitats do not correspond to typical contexts such as home or work. The
temporal evolution of mobility within habitats, which constitutes most motion,
is universal across habitats and exhibits scaling patterns both distinct from
all previous observations and unpredicted by current models. The delay to enter
subsidiary habitats is a primary factor in the spatiotemporal growth of human
travel. Interestingly, habitats correlate with non-mobility dynamics such as
communication activity, implying that habitats may influence processes such as
information spreading and revealing new connections between human mobility and
social networks.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.0224
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