Scaling law of individual urban tour behavior

TL;DR

This paper investigates the distribution of urban tour lengths using Foursquare data, revealing a truncated power-law pattern, and introduces a model that reproduces key mobility laws, enhancing understanding of individual urban movement.

Contribution

It uncovers the truncated power-law distribution of urban tour lengths and proposes a tour terminate-continue model that captures multiple mobility laws.

Findings

Urban tour lengths follow a truncated power-law distribution.

The proposed model reproduces Heaps' law, Zipf's law, and radius of gyration distribution.

Provides a new perspective for characterizing individual human mobility.

Abstract

Analyzing and modeling the mobility process with tour behavior is fundamental to understanding a wide range of complex systems, including animal foraging, human mobility and freight transportation. However, despite their importance, the distribution of tour length has long been neglected in individual human mobility models. To fill this gap, we analyze Foursquare users' check-in data and find that the distribution of urban tour length follows a truncated power-law distribution. To reproduce the universal scaling law for human mobility in urban areas, we introduce a tour terminate-continue model. Our model reproduces not only the urban tour length distribution but also Heaps' law, Zipf's lawand the distribution of the radius of gyration, providing a new perspective for characterizing individual human mobility.