The scaling laws of human travel Export

@misc{citeulike:667607, abstract = {The dynamic spatial redistribution of individuals is a key driving force of various spatiotemporal phenomena on geographical scales. It can synchronise populations of interacting species, stabilise them, and diversify gene pools [1-3]. Human travelling, e.g. is responsible for the geographical spread of human infectious disease [4-9]. In the light of increasing international trade, intensified human mobility and an imminent influenza A epidemic [10] the knowledge of dynamical and statistical properties of human travel is thus of fundamental importance. Despite its crucial role, a quantitative assessment of these properties on geographical scales remains elusive and the assumption that humans disperse diffusively still prevails in models. Here we report on a solid and quantitative assessment of human travelling statistics by analysing the circulation of bank notes in the United States. Based on a comprehensive dataset of over a million individual displacements we find that dispersal is anomalous in two ways. First, the distribution of travelling distances decays as a power law, indicating that trajectories of bank notes are reminiscent of scale free random walks known as Levy flights. Secondly, the probability of remaining in a small, spatially confined region for a time T is dominated by algebraically long tails which attenuate the superdiffusive spread. We show that human travelling behaviour can be described mathematically on many spatiotemporal scales by a two parameter continuous time random walk model to a surprising accuracy and conclude that human travel on geographical scales is an ambivalent effectively superdiffusive process.}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, author = {Brockmann, D. and Hufnagel, L. and Geisel, T.}, citeulike-article-id = {667607}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0605511}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0605511}, day = {22}, eprint = {cond-mat/0605511}, keywords = {human, stochastic, travel}, month = {May}, posted-at = {2008-11-04 17:32:58}, priority = {2}, title = {The scaling laws of human travel}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0605511}, year = {2006} }

TY - ELEC ID - citeulike:667607 L3 - citeulike-article-id:667607 N2 - The dynamic spatial redistribution of individuals is a key driving force of various spatiotemporal phenomena on geographical scales. It can synchronise populations of interacting species, stabilise them, and diversify gene pools [1-3]. Human travelling, e.g. is responsible for the geographical spread of human infectious disease [4-9]. In the light of increasing international trade, intensified human mobility and an imminent influenza A epidemic [10] the knowledge of dynamical and statistical properties of human travel is thus of fundamental importance. Despite its crucial role, a quantitative assessment of these properties on geographical scales remains elusive and the assumption that humans disperse diffusively still prevails in models. Here we report on a solid and quantitative assessment of human travelling statistics by analysing the circulation of bank notes in the United States. Based on a comprehensive dataset of over a million individual displacements we find that dispersal is anomalous in two ways. First, the distribution of travelling distances decays as a power law, indicating that trajectories of bank notes are reminiscent of scale free random walks known as Levy flights. Secondly, the probability of remaining in a small, spatially confined region for a time T is dominated by algebraically long tails which attenuate the superdiffusive spread. We show that human travelling behaviour can be described mathematically on many spatiotemporal scales by a two parameter continuous time random walk model to a surprising accuracy and conclude that human travel on geographical scales is an ambivalent effectively superdiffusive process. TI - The scaling laws of human travel KW - human KW - stochastic KW - travel AU - Brockmann, D AU - Hufnagel, L AU - Geisel, T PY - 2006/May/22/ UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0605511 ER -