Scaling and correlation of human movements in cyberspace and physical space

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of human movements is key to issues of significant current interest such as behavioral prediction, recommendation, and control of epidemic spreading. We collect and analyze big data sets of human movements in both cyberspace (through browsing of websites) and physical space (through mobile towers) and find a superlinear scaling relation between the mean frequency of visit f and its fluctuation σ : σ ∼ f β with β ≈ 1.2. The probability distribution of the visiting frequency is found to be a stretched exponential function. We develop a model incorporating two essential ingredients, preferential return and exploration, and show that these are necessary for generating the scaling relation extracted from real data. A striking finding is that human movements in cyberspace and physical space are strongly correlated, indicating a distinctive behavioral identifying characteristic and implying that the behaviors in one space can be used to predict those in the other. Traditionally, human movements are restricted to the real physical space (or geospace). Pioneering works demonstrated that there are intrinsic patterns underlying human mobility in physical space [1][2][3], which are key to deciphering the dynamics of human behaviors with wide applications ranging from traffic forecasting [4] to epidemic prevention [5]. Triggered by the tremendous advances in modern information and communication technologies, at present as well as in the future, human movements occur not only in physical space but also in virtual or cyberspace. Here movements in cyberspace are defined broadly as changes in online activities, typically corresponding to switchings in the websites of exploration. Examples of cyberspace movements include World Wide Web surfing along hyperlinks and continuous shopping from commercial websites in a single online session. Do human movements in cyberspace and physical space share common features? Are there general scaling relations underlying human movements in both spaces?Studies of human behaviors have been greatly facilitated by the ubiquity of massive empirical data sets (big data sets) that typically record individuals' movements on various temporal and spatial scales [6,7]. For example, great insights into the dynamics of human movements in physical space were gained by tracking and analyzing the dispersal of dollar bills [1] and through mobile phone [2] and GPS [8] data. There were also efforts to uncover human movements in cyberspace during web surfing [9][10][11] and to probe into human interests dynamics unfolded during cyberspace shopping and browsing [12].In this paper we analyze data sets that record mobile phone users' visits to websites in cyberspace and to mobile towers in the physical space simultaneously and search for a correlation between the movements and general scaling relations. Distinguished from existing approaches to humanmobility analysis [1-3], we focus on the relationship between * ying-cheng.lai@asu.edu flux and fluctuations [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In pa...

Human mobility: Models and applications

“…Furthermore, the analyses of CDRs along with the Web activities of 20,000 mobile phone users [389] suggest that visitation frequencies in both activities have a stretched exponential distribution (see Fig. 45).…”

Users’ participation and social influence during information spreading on Twitter

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Foraging patterns in online searches

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