Unraveling daily human mobility motifs

Abstract

Summary form only given. Time scales differentiate human mobility. While the mechanism for longtime 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 analyzing 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, an analytically tractable framework for Markov chains can reproduce daily human mobility by modeling periods of high-frequency trips followed by periods of lower activity as the key ingredient.