Abstract
Uncovering human mobility patterns is of fundamental importance to the understanding of epidemic spreading, urban transportation and other socioeconomic dynamics embodying spatiality and human travel. According to the direct travel diaries of volunteers, we show the absence of scaling properties in the displacement distribution at the individual level,while the aggregated displacement distribution follows a power law with an exponential cutoff. Given the constraint on total travelling cost, this aggregated scaling law can be analytically predicted by the mixture nature of human travel under the principle of maximum entropy. A direct corollary of such theory is that the displacement distribution of a single mode of transportation should follow an exponential law, which also gets supportive evidences in known data. We thus conclude that the travelling cost shapes the displacement distribution at the aggregated level.
Highlights
Uncovering human mobility patterns is of fundamental importance to the understanding of epidemic spreading, urban transportation and other socioeconomic dynamics embodying spatiality and human travel
According to the direct travel diaries of volunteers, we show the absence of scaling properties in the displacement distribution at the individual level,while the aggregated displacement distribution follows a power law with an exponential cutoff
When we use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test[21] to test whether the distributions fit power laws, we find that 87.8% of the individuals cannot pass the test
Summary
Uncovering human mobility patterns is of fundamental importance to the understanding of epidemic spreading, urban transportation and other socioeconomic dynamics embodying spatiality and human travel. Aggregated data from bank notes[16], mobile phones[1] and onboard GPS measurements[3] showed that the displacement distribution of human mobility, for both long-range travel and daily movements, approximately follows a power law. The aggregated displacement distribution follows a power law with an exponential cutoff, which www.nature.com/scientificreports can be analytically explained by the mixed nature of human travel under the principle of maximum entropy. This theory predicts that the displacements using a single mode of transportation will follow an exponential distribution, which is supported by the empirical data on taxi trips, car trips, bus trips and air flights
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