Tracing The Largest Seasonal Migration on Earth

TL;DR

This paper analyzes massive smartphone location data to trace and visualize the large-scale seasonal migration of Chinese people during the Spring Festival, revealing temporal trends and spatial migration patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for analyzing migration flow using large-scale location data, capturing both temporal and spatial migration patterns during a major holiday period.

Findings

Migration peaks around the Spring Festival period

Migration routes are geographically proximate and predictable

Developed regions influence migration destinations

Abstract

It is estimated that over 3.6 billion passengers are travelling during the Chinese Spring Festival travel season. They leave their working cities and return their hometowns to enjoy annual family time, and back to cities after the holiday. In this study, with the massive location-based data collected from millions of smartphone users, we propose a novel method to trace the migration flow and explore the migration patterns of Chinese people. From the temporal perspective, we explore the migration trend over time during a 34-days period, about half a month before and after the Spring Festival. From the spatial perspective, the migration directions and routes are estimated and quantified, and the migration flow is visualized. The spatial range of influence of developed regions could be reflected with the destinations of migration, the migration destinations and originations have obvious characteristic of geographical proximity.