Global holiday datasets for understanding seasonal human mobility and population dynamics

Shengjie Lai,Maksym Bondarenko,Alessandro Sorichetta,Weifeng Shi,Andrew J Tatem,Dorothea Woods,Corrine W Ruktanonchai,Jessica Steele,Grant Rogers,Patrycja Koper,Nick W Ruktanonchai,Alexander D Cunningham

doi:10.1038/s41597-022-01120-z

Abstract

Public and school holidays have important impacts on population mobility and dynamics across multiple spatial and temporal scales, subsequently affecting the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases and many socioeconomic activities. However, worldwide data on public and school holidays for understanding their changes across regions and years have not been assembled into a single, open-source and multitemporal dataset. To address this gap, an open access archive of data on public and school holidays in 2010–2019 across the globe at daily, weekly, and monthly timescales was constructed. Airline passenger volumes across 90 countries from 2010 to 2018 were also assembled to illustrate the usage of the holiday data for understanding the changing spatiotemporal patterns of population movements.

Highlights

Some determinants play a greater role than others, including school terms, religious festivals, and national holidays[13,14]
Major national public or religious holidays are associated with shifts in the scope of travel and drive strong fluctuations
Increasing volumes of travel are commonly found around Christmas in Kenya, Namibia, and the United States, while travel decreases during Ramadan in Pakistan[13]

Summary

Background & Summary

Human populations are increasingly mobile, across both high- and low-income settings[1–3]. Comprehensive and contemporary datasets of historical public and school holidays for nations around the world and their changes over time are critical for understanding the seasonality of human domestic and international movements. This has many potential applications across disciplines, from travel estimation, transport planning and management, resource allocation, to public health service provision and monitoring efforts. To illustrate the usage of holiday datasets for understanding seasonal patterns of human mobility, these time series of holidays are compared against the statistics of airline passengers by month from 2010 to 2018, assembled in this study, and a dataset of monthly international airline ticket bookings across the world in 2015–2019, used in a previous COVID-19 research[22]. All products are available through the WorldPop website (https://www.worldpop.org/)[26–32]

Methods

Code availability