Understanding individual human mobility patterns.

Full Abstract

Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period. We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling.

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Author information

Author/s: González, Marta C (MC); Hidalgo, César A (CA); Barabási, Albert-László (AL);

Affiliation: Center for Complex Network Research and Department of Physics, Biology and Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: Nature (Nature), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Jun; vol 453 (issue 7196) : pp 779-82

Dates: Created 2008/06/05; Completed 2008/07/15;

PMID: 18528393, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Cellular Phone - statistics & numerical data
Disaster Planning
Geographic Information Systems
Humans

Locomotion
Models, Statistical
Probability
Travel - statistics & numerical data

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