Human Mobility in a Continuum Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a continuum framework for human mobility modeling that unifies existing models and derives a new radiation model, validated with census and mobile phone data, revealing simple stochastic processes underlying complex mobility networks.

Contribution

A novel continuum approach that unifies existing mobility models and introduces a new radiation model, validated with real-world data.

Findings

The new radiation model accurately fits observed mobility data.

Complex mobility network features can arise from simple stochastic processes.

The framework encompasses gravity, intervening opportunities, and radiation models as special cases.

Abstract

Human mobility is investigated using a continuum approach that allows to calculate the probability to observe a trip to anyarbitrary region, and the fluxes between any two regions. The considered description offers a general and unified framework, in which previously proposed mobility models like the gravity model, the intervening opportunities model, and the recently introduced radiation model are naturally resulting as special cases. A new form of radiation model is derived and its validity is investigated using observational data offered by commuting trips obtained from the United States census data set, and the mobility fluxesextracted from mobile phone data collected in a western European country. The new modeling paradigm offered by this description suggests that the complex topological features observed in large mobility and transportation networks may be the result of a simple stochastic process taking place on an inhomogeneous landscape.