Noulas, A;
Scellato, S;
Lambiotte, R;
Pontil, M;
Mascolo, C;
(2012)
A Tale of Many Cities: Universal Patterns in Human Urban Mobility.
PLOS ONE
, 7
(5)
, Article e37027. 10.1371/journal.pone.0037027.
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Abstract
The advent of geographic online social networks such as Foursquare, where users voluntarily signal their current location, opens the door to powerful studies on human movement. In particular the fine granularity of the location data, with GPS accuracy down to 10 meters, and the worldwide scale of Foursquare adoption are unprecedented. In this paper we study urban mobility patterns of people in several metropolitan cities around the globe by analyzing a large set of Foursquare users. Surprisingly, while there are variations in human movement in different cities, our analysis shows that those are predominantly due to different distributions of places across different urban environments. Moreover, a universal law for human mobility is identified, which isolates as a key component the rank-distance, factoring in the number of places between origin and destination, rather than pure physical distance, as considered in some previous works. Building on our findings, we also show how a rank-based movement model accurately captures real human movements in different cities.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | A Tale of Many Cities: Universal Patterns in Human Urban Mobility |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0037027 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037027 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2012 Noulas et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY05-51164 and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Formal Correction: Errors in figure placement and references.The last three figures were misplaced. The figure published as Figure 10 is actually Figure 12. The figure published as Figure 11 is actually Figure 10. the figure published as Figure 12 is actually Figure 11. The legends are in the correct locations. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1381972 |
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