Friendship and Mobility: User Movement In Location-Based Social Networks

21 Aug 2011  ·  E. Cho, S.A. Myers, J. Leskovec ·

Even though human movement and mobility patterns have a high degree of freedom and variation, they also exhibit structural pat- terns due to geographic and social constraints. Using cell phone location data, as well as data from two online location-based social networks, we aim to understand what basic laws govern human mo- tion and dynamics. We find that humans experience a combination of periodic movement that is geographically limited and seemingly random jumps correlated with their social networks. Short-ranged travel is periodic both spatially and temporally and not effected by the social network structure, while long-distance travel is more in- fluenced by social network ties. We show that social relationships can explain about 10% to 30% of all human movement, while pe- riodic behavior explains 50% to 70%. Based on our findings, we develop a model of human mobility that combines periodic short range movements with travel due to the social network structure. We show that our model reliably predicts the locations and dynam- ics of future human movement and gives an order of magnitude better performance than present models of human mobility.

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