Abstract
There is a contradiction at the heart of our current understanding of
individual and collective mobility patterns. On one hand, a highly influential
stream of literature on human mobility driven by analyses of massive empirical
datasets finds that human movements show no evidence of characteristic spatial
scales. There, human mobility is described as scale-free. On the other hand, in
geography, the concept of scale, referring to meaningful levels of description
from individual buildings through neighborhoods, cities, regions, and
countries, is central for the description of various aspects of human behavior
such as socio-economic interactions, or political and cultural dynamics. Here,
we resolve this apparent paradox by showing that day-to-day human mobility does
indeed contain meaningful scales, corresponding to spatial containers
restricting mobility behavior. The scale-free results arise from aggregating
displacements across containers. We present a simple model, which given a
person's trajectory, infers their neighborhoods, cities, and so on, as well as
the sizes of these geographical containers. We find that the containers
characterizing the trajectories of more than 700,000 individuals do indeed have
typical sizes. We show that our model generates highly realistic trajectories
without overfitting and provides a new lens through which to understand the
differences in mobility behaviour across countries, gender groups, and
urban-rural areas.
Description
[2109.07381] The Scales of Human Mobility