Exploring Human Mobility Patterns Based on Location Information of US Flights

TL;DR

This study analyzes US flight data to uncover human mobility patterns, revealing power law distributions in topological properties and exponential travel length distributions, with implications for understanding mobility based on airport connectivity.

Contribution

It introduces the application of the head/tail division rule to extract airport features and demonstrates that mobility patterns are mainly driven by airport topology rather than travel distances or behaviors.

Findings

Traffic volume and connectivity follow power law distributions.

Travel lengths exhibit exponential distribution, not power law.

Mobility patterns are primarily influenced by airport topology.

Abstract

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