Human Mobility Mining through Head/Tail Breaks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for analyzing human mobility patterns by applying head/tail breaks to better characterize visited places and their significance in individual movement behaviors.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach using head/tail breaks to uncover the roles and importance of visited places in human mobility analysis.

Findings

Enhanced understanding of place significance in mobility patterns

Improved characterization of visited locations using head/tail breaks

Potential for better mobility prediction and management

Abstract

Nowadays as the world population has become more interconnected and is relying on faster transportation methods, simplified connections and shorter commuting times, we witness a rapid increase in human mobility. In this situation unveiling and understanding human mobility patterns have become a crucial issue to support decisions and prediction activities when managing the complexity of the today social organization. In practice, the mobility pattern of each individual person consists of the sequence of visited places. Those places and their correlations represent the foundation of most modelling and activity researches for understanding human mobility. Even though visited places underpin almost the majority of works in this field, their features remain largely unknown because in previous works, they have been mainly considered as uncharacterized spot points in an area or social gathering places, without considering the roles and importance of places to the behavior of each single user.