Publikationsdatenbank

Unravelling daily human mobility motifs (2013)

Art

Zeitschriftenartikel / wissenschaftlicher Beitrag

Autoren

Schneider, Christian M.

Belik, Vitaly

Couronné, Thomas

Smoreda, Zbigniew

González, Marta C.

Quelle

Interface : journal of the Royal Society

Bandzählung: 10

Heftzählung: 84

Seiten: Article 20130246

ISSN: 1742-5689

Sprache

Englisch

Verweise

URL (Volltext): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2013.0246

DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2013.0246

Pubmed: 23658117

Kontakt

Institut für Veterinär-Epidemiologie und Biometrie

Königsweg 67
14163 Berlin
+49 30 838 56034
epi@vetmed.fu-berlin.de

Abstract / Zusammenfassung

Human mobility is differentiated by time scales. While the mechanism for long time scales has been studied, the underlying mechanism on the daily scale is still unrevealed. Here, we uncover the mechanism responsible for the daily mobility patterns by analysing the temporal and spatial trajectories of thousands of persons as individual networks. Using the concept of motifs from network theory, we find only 17 unique networks are present in daily mobility and they follow simple rules. These networks, called here motifs, are sufficient to capture up to 90 per cent of the population in surveys and mobile phone datasets for different countries. Each individual exhibits a characteristic motif, which seems to be stable over several months. Consequently, daily human mobility can be reproduced by an analytically tractable framework for Markov chains by modelling periods of high-frequency trips followed by periods of lower activity as the key ingredient.