Spatiotemporal Patterns of Urban Human Mobility

The modeling of human mobility is adopting new directions due to the increasing availability of big data sources from human activity. These sources enclose digital information about daily visited locations of a large number of individuals. Examples of these data include: mobile phone calls, credit c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hasan, Samiul, Schneider, Christian M., Ukkusuri, Satish V., Gonzalez, Marta C.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Springer Science+Business Media 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/89404
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8482-0318
Description
Summary:The modeling of human mobility is adopting new directions due to the increasing availability of big data sources from human activity. These sources enclose digital information about daily visited locations of a large number of individuals. Examples of these data include: mobile phone calls, credit card transactions, bank notes dispersal, check-ins in internet applications, among several others. In this study, we consider the data obtained from smart subway fare card transactions to characterize and model urban mobility patterns. We present a simple mobility model for predicting peoples’ visited locations using the popularity of places in the city as an interaction parameter between different individuals. This ingredient is sufficient to reproduce several characteristics of the observed travel behavior such as: the number of trips between different locations in the city, the exploration of new places and the frequency of individual visits of a particular location. Moreover, we indicate the limitations of the proposed model and discuss open questions in the current state of the art statistical models of human mobility.