Revealing temporal stay patterns in human mobility using large‐scale mobile phone location data

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiping Yang ◽  
Zhixiang Fang ◽  
Yang Xu ◽  
Ling Yin ◽  
Junyi Li ◽  
...  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 160950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Panigutti ◽  
Michele Tizzoni ◽  
Paolo Bajardi ◽  
Zbigniew Smoreda ◽  
Vittoria Colizza

The recent availability of large-scale call detail record data has substantially improved our ability of quantifying human travel patterns with broad applications in epidemiology. Notwithstanding a number of successful case studies, previous works have shown that using different mobility data sources, such as mobile phone data or census surveys, to parametrize infectious disease models can generate divergent outcomes. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent epidemic modelling results may vary when using different proxies for human movements. Here, we systematically compare 658 000 simulated outbreaks generated with a spatially structured epidemic model based on two different human mobility networks: a commuting network of France extracted from mobile phone data and another extracted from a census survey. We compare epidemic patterns originating from all the 329 possible outbreak seed locations and identify the structural network properties of the seeding nodes that best predict spatial and temporal epidemic patterns to be alike. We find that similarity of simulated epidemics is significantly correlated to connectivity, traffic and population size of the seeding nodes, suggesting that the adequacy of mobile phone data for infectious disease models becomes higher when epidemics spread between highly connected and heavily populated locations, such as large urban areas.


Author(s):  
Amy Wesolowski ◽  
Nathan Eagle

The worldwide adoption of mobile phones is providing researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to utilize large-scale data to better understand human behavior. This chapter highlights the potential use of mobile phone data to better understand the dynamics driving slums in Kenya. Given slum dwellers informal and transient lifetimes (in terms of places of employment, living situations, etc.), comprehensive longitude behavioral data sets are rare. Working with communication and location data from Kenya’s leading mobile phone operator, the authors use mobile phone data as a window into the social, mobile, and economic dimensions of slum dwellers. The authors address questions about the functionality of slums in urban areas in terms of economic, social, and migratory dynamics. In particular, the authors discuss economic mobility in slums, the importance of social networks, and the connectivity between slums and other urban areas. With four years until the 2015 deadline to meet the Millennium Development Goals, including the goal to improve the lives of slum dwellers worldwide, there is a great need for tools to make development and urban planning decisions more beneficial and precise.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Yabe ◽  
Satish V. Ukkusuri ◽  
P. Suresh C. Rao

Abstract Recent disasters have shown the existence of large variance in recovery trajectories across cities that have experienced similar damage levels. Case studies of such events reveal the high complexity of the recovery process of cities, where inter-city dependencies and intra-city coupling of social and physical systems may affect the outcomes in unforeseen ways. Despite the large implications of understanding the recovery processes of cities after disasters for many domains including critical services, disaster management, and public health, little work have been performed to unravel this complexity. Rather, works are limited to analyzing and modeling cities as independent entities, and have largely neglected the effect that inter-city connectivity may have on the recovery of each city. Large scale mobility data (e.g. mobile phone data, social media data) have enabled us to observe human mobility patterns within and across cities with high spatial and temporal granularity. In this paper, we investigate how inter-city dependencies in both physical as well as social forms contribute to the recovery performances of cities after disasters, through a case study of the population recovery patterns of 78 Puerto Rican counties after Hurricane Maria using mobile phone location data. Various network metrics are used to quantify the types of inter-city dependencies that play an important role for effective post-disaster recovery. We find that inter-city social connectivity, which is measured by pre-disaster mobility patterns, is crucial for quicker recovery after Hurricane Maria. More specifically, counties that had more influx and outflux of people prior to the hurricane, were able to recover faster. Our findings highlight the importance of fostering the social connectivity between cities to prepare effectively for future disasters. This paper introduces a new perspective in the community resilience literature, where we take into account the inter-city dependencies in the recovery process rather than analyzing each community as independent entities.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Xu ◽  
Shih-Lung Shaw ◽  
Ziliang Zhao ◽  
Ling Yin ◽  
Zhixiang Fang ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guangshuo Chen ◽  
Aline Carneiro Viana ◽  
Marco Fiore ◽  
Carlos Sarraute

Abstract Mobile phone data are a popular source of positioning information in many recent studies that have largely improved our understanding of human mobility. These data consist of time-stamped and geo-referenced communication events recorded by network operators, on a per-subscriber basis. They allow for unprecedented tracking of populations of millions of individuals over long periods that span months. Nevertheless, due to the uneven processes that govern mobile communications, the sampling of user locations provided by mobile phone data tends to be sparse and irregular in time, leading to substantial gaps in the resulting trajectory information. In this paper, we illustrate the severity of the problem through an empirical study of a large-scale Call Detail Records (CDR) dataset. We then propose Context-enhanced Trajectory Reconstruction, a new technique that hinges on tensor factorization as a core method to complete individual CDR-based trajectories. The proposed solution infers missing locations with a median displacement within two network cells from the actual position of the user, on an hourly basis and even when as little as 1% of her original mobility is known. Our approach lets us revisit seminal works in the light of complete mobility data, unveiling potential biases that incomplete trajectories obtained from legacy CDR induce on key results about human mobility laws, trajectory uniqueness, and movement predictability.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (173) ◽  
pp. 20200344
Author(s):  
Chenfeng Xiong ◽  
Songhua Hu ◽  
Mofeng Yang ◽  
Hannah Younes ◽  
Weiyu Luo ◽  
...  

One approach to delaying the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is to reduce human travel by imposing travel restriction policies. Understanding the actual human mobility response to such policies remains a challenge owing to the lack of an observed and large-scale dataset describing human mobility during the pandemic. This study uses an integrated dataset, consisting of anonymized and privacy-protected location data from over 150 million monthly active samples in the USA, COVID-19 case data and census population information, to uncover mobility changes during COVID-19 and under the stay-at-home state orders in the USA. The study successfully quantifies human mobility responses with three important metrics: daily average number of trips per person; daily average person-miles travelled; and daily percentage of residents staying at home. The data analytics reveal a spontaneous mobility reduction that occurred regardless of government actions and a ‘floor’ phenomenon, where human mobility reached a lower bound and stopped decreasing soon after each state announced the stay-at-home order. A set of longitudinal models is then developed and confirms that the states' stay-at-home policies have only led to about a 5% reduction in average daily human mobility. Lessons learned from the data analytics and longitudinal models offer valuable insights for government actions in preparation for another COVID-19 surge or another virus outbreak in the future.


2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (23) ◽  
pp. 6421-6426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flavio Finger ◽  
Tina Genolet ◽  
Lorenzo Mari ◽  
Guillaume Constantin de Magny ◽  
Noël Magloire Manga ◽  
...  

The spatiotemporal evolution of human mobility and the related fluctuations of population density are known to be key drivers of the dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks. These factors are particularly relevant in the case of mass gatherings, which may act as hotspots of disease transmission and spread. Understanding these dynamics, however, is usually limited by the lack of accurate data, especially in developing countries. Mobile phone call data provide a new, first-order source of information that allows the tracking of the evolution of mobility fluxes with high resolution in space and time. Here, we analyze a dataset of mobile phone records of ∼150,000 users in Senegal to extract human mobility fluxes and directly incorporate them into a spatially explicit, dynamic epidemiological framework. Our model, which also takes into account other drivers of disease transmission such as rainfall, is applied to the 2005 cholera outbreak in Senegal, which totaled more than 30,000 reported cases. Our findings highlight the major influence that a mass gathering, which took place during the initial phase of the outbreak, had on the course of the epidemic. Such an effect could not be explained by classic, static approaches describing human mobility. Model results also show how concentrated efforts toward disease control in a transmission hotspot could have an important effect on the large-scale progression of an outbreak.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiwei Lu ◽  
Zhixiang Fang ◽  
Xirui Zhang ◽  
Shih-Lung Shaw ◽  
Ling Yin ◽  
...  

Entropy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 736
Author(s):  
Alicia Rodriguez-Carrion ◽  
Carlos Garcia-Rubio ◽  
Celeste Campo

Correctly estimating the features characterizing human mobility from mobile phone traces is a key factor to improve the performance of mobile networks, as well as for mobility model design and urban planning. Most related works found their conclusions on location data based on the cells where each user sends or receives calls or messages, data known as Call Detail Records (CDRs). In this work, we test if such data sets provide enough detail on users’ movements so as to accurately estimate some of the most studied mobility features. We perform the analysis using two different data sets, comparing CDRs with respect to an alternative data collection approach. Furthermore, we propose three filtering techniques to reduce the biases detected in the fraction of visits per cell, entropy and entropy rate distributions, and predictability. The analysis highlights the need for contextualizing mobility results with respect to the data used, since the conclusions are biased by the mobile phone traces collection approach.


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