Temporal understanding of human mobility: A multi-time scale analysis

PLoS One. 2018 Nov 27;13(11):e0207697. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207697. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

The recent availability of digital traces generated by cellphone calls has significantly increased the scientific understanding of human mobility. Until now, however, based on low time resolution measurements, previous works have ignored to study human mobility under various time scales due to sparse and irregular calls, particularly in the era of mobile Internet. In this paper, we introduced Mobile Flow Records, flow-level data access records of online activity of smartphone users, to explore human mobility. Mobile Flow Records collect high-resolution information of large populations. By exploiting this kind of data, we show the models and statistics of human mobility at a large-scale (3,542,235 individuals) and finer-granularity (7.5min). Next, we investigated statistical variations and biases of mobility models caused by different time scales (from 7.5min to 32h), and found that the time scale does influence the mobility model, which indicates a deep coupling of human mobility and time. We further show that mobility behaviors like transportation modes contribute to the diversity of human mobility, by exploring several novel and refined features (e.g., motion speed, duration, and trajectory distance). Particularly, we point out that 2-hour sampling adopted in previous works is insufficient to study detailed motion behaviors. Our work not only offers a macroscopic and microscopic view of spatial-temporal human mobility, but also applies previously unavailable features, both of which are beneficial to the studies on phenomena driven by human mobility.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cell Phone / statistics & numerical data*
  • Data Collection / methods
  • Data Collection / statistics & numerical data*
  • Geographic Information Systems / statistics & numerical data*
  • Humans
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Spatio-Temporal Analysis*
  • Time Factors

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.7001114.v1

Grants and funding

Zheng Yang received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), grant number 61522110. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.