TY - JOUR PY - 2018// TI - Temporal understanding of human mobility: a multi-time scale analysis JO - PLoS one A1 - Liu, Tongtong A1 - Yang, Zheng A1 - Zhao, Yi A1 - Wu, Chenshu A1 - Zhou, Zimu A1 - Liu, Yunhao SP - e0207697 EP - e0207697 VL - 13 IS - 11 N2 - The recent availability of digital traces generated by cellphone calls has significantly increased the scientific understanding of human mobility. Until now, however, based on low time resolution measurements, previous works have ignored to study human mobility under various time scales due to sparse and irregular calls, particularly in the era of mobile Internet. In this paper, we introduced Mobile Flow Records, flow-level data access records of online activity of smartphone users, to explore human mobility. Mobile Flow Records collect high-resolution information of large populations. By exploiting this kind of data, we show the models and statistics of human mobility at a large-scale (3,542,235 individuals) and finer-granularity (7.5min). Next, we investigated statistical variations and biases of mobility models caused by different time scales (from 7.5min to 32h), and found that the time scale does influence the mobility model, which indicates a deep coupling of human mobility and time. We further show that mobility behaviors like transportation modes contribute to the diversity of human mobility, by exploring several novel and refined features (e.g., motion speed, duration, and trajectory distance). Particularly, we point out that 2-hour sampling adopted in previous works is insufficient to study detailed motion behaviors. Our work not only offers a macroscopic and microscopic view of spatial-temporal human mobility, but also applies previously unavailable features, both of which are beneficial to the studies on phenomena driven by human mobility.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 1932-6203 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207697 ID - ref1 ER -