On the properties of human mobility

Abstract

The current age of increased people mobility calls for a better understanding of how people move: how many places does an individual commonly visit, what are the semantics of these places, and how do people get from one place to another. We show that the number of places visited by each person (Points of Interest -PoIs) is regulated by some properties that are statistically similar among individuals. Subsequently, we present a PoIs classification in terms of their relevance on a per-user basis. In addition to the PoIs relevance, we also investigate the variables that describe the travel rules among PoIs in particular, the spatial and temporal distance. As regards the latter, existing works on mobility are mainly based on spatial distance. Here we argue, rather, that for human mobility the temporal distance and the PoIs relevance are the major driving factors. Moreover, we study the semantic of PoIs. This is useful for deriving statistics on people's habits without breaking their privacy. With the support of different datasets, our paper provides an in-depth analysis of PoIs distribution and semantics; it also shows that our results hold independently of the nature of the dataset in use. We illustrate that our approach is able to effectively extract a rich set of features describing human mobility and we argue that this can be seminal to novel mobility research.

Spatial patterns of dengue cases in Brazil

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Urban groups: behavior and dynamics of social groups in urban space

“…As we can observe, most of the groups co-locate in very few places; mean, median and standard deviations are 3.16, 2 and 2.54, respectively. This result shows that urban groups are characterized by few visited locations, in strict analogy with individuals' mobility [18,41].…”

“…CDR-based datasets have been adopted extensively in literature to study human mobility patterns [14][15][16][17][18]. All these research projects derive locations by positioning cell towers in geographical areas where each cell tower may cover a zone as wide as a few kilometers.…”

Impact of overlapping in the radio coverage areas of multiple Wi-Fi access points on detecting encounters

“…Human mobility studying (Karamshuk, Boldrini, Conti, & Passarella, 2011) has become the topic of interest among the wide group of researchers in the last decade, mainly due to the its impact on so many different theoretical and applicative researches (Gonzalez, Hidaglo, & Barabasi, 2008;Papandrea et al, 2016;Pirozmand, Wu, Jedari, & Xia, 2014;Riascos & Mateos, 2017). Wireless devices such as smartphones, tablets, and other Wi-Fi enabled devices are mainly carried by humans, thus exhibiting movement patterns that are related to the human mobility patterns and behaviours.…”