Entropic measures of individual mobility patterns

TL;DR

This study uses entropy measures on GPS data to uncover hierarchical structures in human mobility, revealing different activity categories and limitations of Markov models in capturing these patterns.

Contribution

It introduces entropy-based analysis of GPS mobility data to identify activity hierarchies and assess the limitations of Markov models in reproducing human mobility.

Findings

Hierarchical structure divides activities into three categories by time cost.

Markov process fails to replicate the observed activity hierarchy.

Mobility patterns exhibit distinct information content across activity categories.

Abstract

Understanding human mobility from a microscopic point of view may represent a fundamental breakthrough for the development of a statistical physics for cognitive systems and it can shed light on the applicability of macroscopic statistical laws for social systems. Even if the complexity of individual behaviors prevents a true microscopic approach, the introduction of mesoscopic models allows the study of the dynamical properties for the non-stationary states of the considered system. We propose to compute various entropy measures of the individual mobility patterns obtained from GPS data that record the movements of private vehicles in the Florence district, in order to point out new features of human mobility related to the use of time and space and to define the dynamical properties of a stochastic model that could generate similar patterns. Moreover, we can relate the predictability properties of human mobility to the distribution of time passed between two successive trips. Our analysis suggests the existence of a hierarchical structure in the mobility patterns which divides the performed activities into three different categories, according to the time cost, with different information contents. We show that a Markov process defined by using the individual mobility network is not able to reproduce this hierarchy, which seems the consequence of different strategies in the activity choice. Our results could contribute to the development of governance policies for a sustainable mobility in modern cities.