2011/04/23 by Bin Jiang, Tao Jia, Jiang, Bin +1
Computer Science · Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Data Analysis #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Impact of Light on Environment and Health #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an) #Urban Design and Spatial Analysis #cs.SI #physics.data-an #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1104.4578
20 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, structural change from draft to this revision and more details on data processing
openalex publication_date 2011/04/23 · arxiv created 2011/08/05 · arxiv updated 2011/08/08 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A range of early studies have been conducted to illustrate human mobility patterns using different tracking data, such as dollar notes, cell phones and taxicabs. Here, we explore human mobility patterns based on massive tracking data of US flights. Both topological and geometric properties are examined in detail. We found that topological properties, such as traffic volume (between airports) and degree of connectivity (of individual airports), including both in- and outdegrees, follow a power law distribution but not a geometric property like travel lengths. The travel lengths exhibit an exponential distribution rather than a power law with an exponential cutoff as previous studies illustrated. We further simulated human mobility on the established topologies of airports with various moving behaviors and found that the mobility patterns are mainly attributed to the underlying binary topology of airports and have little to do with other factors, such as moving behaviors and geometric distances. Apart from the above findings, this study adopts the head/tail division rule, which is regularity behind any heavy-tailed distribution for extracting individual airports. The adoption of this rule for data processing constitutes another major contribution of this paper. Keywords: scaling of geographic space, head/tail division rule, power law, geographic information, agent-based simulations