Understanding individual human mobility patterns

TL;DR

This study analyzes the mobility patterns of 100,000 mobile phone users over six months, revealing that humans follow simple, reproducible spatial patterns with high regularity, contrasting with random walk models.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that human mobility is characterized by regularity and common spatial distributions, challenging previous random walk assumptions.

Findings

Humans exhibit high temporal and spatial regularity in movement.

Travel patterns collapse into a universal spatial distribution after normalization.

Individuals tend to return to a few highly frequented locations.

Abstract

Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting, and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited thanks to the lack of tools to monitor the time resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six month period. We find that in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Levy flight and random walk models, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time independent characteristic length scale and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent based modeling.