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Scaling Behavior of Human Mobility Distributions

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Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9927))

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Abstract

Recent technical advances have made high-fidelity tracking of populations possible. However, these datasets, such as GPS traces, can be comprised of millions of records, well beyond what even a skilled analyst can digest. To facilitate human analysis, these records are often expressed as aggregate distributions capturing behaviors of interest. While these aggregate distributions can provide substantial insight, the spatio-temporal resolution at which they are captured can impact the shape of the resulting distribution. We present an analysis of five spatial datasets, and codify the impact of rebinning the data at different spatio-temporal resolutions. We find that all aggregate metrics considered are affected by rebinning, but that some distributions do so regularly and predictably, while others do not. This work provides important insight into which metrics can be used to compare human behavior across datasets and the kinds of relationships between that can be expected.

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Notes

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    http://www.nutonian.com/products/eureqa-server/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.r-project.org/.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for providing funding for this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Tuhin Paul, Kevin Stanley & Nathaniel Osgood

  2. Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Nathaniel Osgood & Nazeem Muhajarine

  3. Department of Geography and Planning, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Scott Bell

Authors
  1. Tuhin Paul
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  2. Kevin Stanley
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  3. Nathaniel Osgood
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  4. Scott Bell
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  5. Nazeem Muhajarine
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tuhin Paul .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas at Austin , Austin, Texas, USA

    Jennifer A. Miller

  2. University of California at Berkeley , Berkeley, California, USA

    David O'Sullivan

  3. University of Wisconsin-Madison , Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Nancy Wiegand

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Paul, T., Stanley, K., Osgood, N., Bell, S., Muhajarine, N. (2016). Scaling Behavior of Human Mobility Distributions. In: Miller, J., O'Sullivan, D., Wiegand, N. (eds) Geographic Information Science. GIScience 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9927. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45737-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45738-3

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