Abstract
Thanks to their widespread usage, mobile devices have become one of the main sensors of human behaviour and digital traces left behind can be used as a proxy to study urban environments. Exploring the nature of the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity could thus be a crucial step towards understanding the full spectrum of human activities. Using 10 months of mobile phone records from Greater London resolved in both space and time, we investigate the regularity of human telecommunication activity on urban scales. We evaluate several options for decomposing activity timelines into typical and residual patterns, accounting for the strong periodic and seasonal components. We carry out our analysis on various spatial scales, showing that regularity increases as we look at aggregated activity in larger spatial units with more activity in them. We examine the statistical properties of the residuals and show that it can be explained by noise and specific outliers. Also, we look at sources of deviations from the general trends, which we find to be explainable based on knowledge of the city structure and places of attractions. We show examples how some of the outliers can be related to external factors such as specific social events.
Highlights
With advances in infocommunication technologies, data collection and analysis applications, it has recently became possible to study the dynamics of human activity on unprecedented scales [1,2,3]
We have looked at regularity at various spatial aggregation levels and found that it depends on the level of aggregation: irregularities cancel out on larger spatial scales
We have demonstrated the possibility to decompose localized timelines of telecommunications activity into regular and residual patterns on 10 months of aggregated mobile network usage data from the Greater London area
Summary
With advances in infocommunication technologies, data collection and analysis applications, it has recently became possible to study the dynamics of human activity on unprecedented scales [1,2,3]. Previous work includes 2 the analysis of mobility [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15], the structure of social networks as represented in interactions captured by various mobile devices [8,16,17,18,19,20], the structure of urban environments [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29], economic implications of these [9,30,31,32] and establishing the basis for a possible data-driven modelling of social and economical phenomena in cities [33,34,35]. A remarkable finding among these studies is that a high degree of regularity can be established in human activities [4,5,23,36], despite seemingly irregular, ‘bursty’ behaviour apparent in many cases [4,37,38,39]
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