Introduced in its contemporary form by George Kingsley Zipf in 1946, but with roots that go back to the work of Gaspard Monge in the 18th century, the gravity law is the prevailing framework to predict population movement, cargo shipping volume, inter-city phone calls, as well as bilateral trade flows between nations. Despite its widespread use, it relies on adjustable parameters that vary from region to region and suffers from known analytic inconsistencies. Here we introduce a stochastic process capturing local mobility decisions that helps us analytically derive commuting and mobility fluxes that require as input only information on the population distribution. The resulting radiation model predicts mobility patterns in good agreement with mobility and transport patterns observed in a wide range of phenomena, from long-term migration patterns to communication volume between different regions. Given its parameter-free nature, the model can be applied in areas where we lack previous mobility measurements, significantly improving the predictive accuracy of most of phenomena affected by mobility and transport processes.
Human migration is a type of human mobility, where a trip involves a person moving with the intention of changing their home location. Predicting human migration as accurately as possible is important in city planning applications, international trade, spread of infectious diseases, conservation planning, and public policy development. Traditional human mobility models, such as gravity models or the more recent radiation model, predict human mobility flows based on population and distance features only. These models have been validated on commuting flows, a different type of human mobility, an…
Public stakeholders implement several policies and regulations to tackle gender gaps, fostering the change in the cultural constructs associated with gender. One way to quantify if such changes elicit gender equality is by studying mobility. In this work, we study the daily mobility patterns of women and men occurring in Medellín (Colombia) in two years: 2005 and 2017. Specifically, we focus on the spatiotemporal differences in the travels and find that purpose of travel and occupation characterise each gender differently. We show that women tend to make shorter trips, corroborating Ravenstein…
Models of social mobility inspired by the Newton's law of gravity have been used for several decades to describe migrations of people, goods, and information. Despite an eminent reference and widespread use, these models lack the background theory, being often viewed as a collection of empirical recipes which rely on adjustable parameters. Here we propose a tractable and fundamental mechanism of social mobility, which explains distance scaling of migration flows and predicts the value of the scaling exponent. The mechanism reveals two key aspects framing social flows, which have direct analogy…
The study of human mobility is both of fundamental importance and of great potential value. For example, it can be leveraged to facilitate efficient city planning and improve prevention strategies when faced with epidemics. The newfound wealth of rich sources of data---including banknote flows, mobile phone records, and transportation data---has led to an explosion of attempts to characterize modern human mobility. Unfortunately, the dearth of comparable historical data makes it much more difficult to study human mobility patterns from the past. In this paper, we present an analysis of long-te…
Monitoring migration flows is crucial to respond to humanitarian crisis and to design efficient policies. This information usually comes from surveys and border controls, but timely accessibility and methodological concerns reduce its usefulness. Here, we propose a method to detect migration flows worldwide using geolocated Twitter data. We focus on the migration crisis in Venezuela and show that the calculated flows are consistent with official statistics at country level. Our method is versatile and far-reaching, as it can be used to study different features of migration as preferred routes,…
In this Letter we follow the short-ranged Syrian refugees' migration to Lebanon as documented by the UNHCR. We propose a model inspired by the Debye-Hückel theory and show that it properly predicts the refugees' mobility while the gravity model fails. We claim that the interaction between origin cities attenuates and/or extenuates the flux to destinations, and consequently, in analogy with the effective charges of interacting particles in a plasma, these source cities are characterized by effective populations determined by their pairwise remoteness/closeness and defined by areas of control be…
We study the role of unbiased migration in cooperation in the framework of spatial evolutionary game on a variety of spatial structures, involving regular lattice, continuous plane and complex networks. A striking finding is that migration plays a universal role in cooperation, regardless of the spatial structures. For high degree of migration, cooperators cannot survive due to the failure of forming cooperator clusters to resist attacks of defectors. While for low degree of migration, cooperation is considerably enhanced compared to statically spatial game, which is due to the strengthening o…
Unsupervised embedding of trajectories captures the latent structure of scientific migration
Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University（印第安纳大学勒迪信息、计算与工程学院）；Network Science Institute at Northeastern University（东北大学网络科学研究所）；Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University（西北大学凯洛格管理学院）；Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems（西北大学复杂系统研究所）；Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University（莱顿大学科学技术研究中心）；Stellenbosch University（斯坦陵布什大学）；Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）
The steady growth of digitized historical information is continuously stimulating new different approaches to the fields of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science. In this work, we use Natural Language Processing techniques to retrieve large amounts of historical information from Wikipedia. In particular, the pages of a set of historically notable individuals are processed to catch the locations and the date of people's movements. This information is then structured in a geographical network of mobility patterns. We analyze the mobility of historically notable individuals from dif…
With remarkable significance in migration prediction, global disease mitigation, urban planning and many others, an arresting challenge is to predict human mobility fluxes between any two locations. A number of methods have been proposed against the above challenge, including the gravity model, the intervening opportunity model, the radiation model, the population-weighted opportunity model, and so on. Despite their theoretical elegance, all models ignored an intuitive and important ingredient in individual decision about where to go, that is, the possible congestion on the way and the possibl…
High skill labour is an important factor underpinning the competitive advantage of modern economies. Therefore, attracting and retaining scientists has become a major concern for migration policy. In this work, we study the migration of scientists on a global scale, by combining two large data sets covering the publications of 3.5 Mio scientists over 60 years. We analyse their geographical distances moved for a new affiliation and their age when moving, this way reconstructing their geographical "career paths". These paths are used to derive the world network of scientists mobility between cit…
We study international mobility in academia, with a focus on the migration of published researchers to and from Russia. Using an exhaustive set of over $2.4$ million Scopus publications, we analyze all researchers who have published with a Russian affiliation address in Scopus-indexed sources in 1996-2020. The migration of researchers is observed through the changes in their affiliation addresses, which altered their mode countries of affiliation across different years. While only $5.2\%$ of these researchers were internationally mobile, they accounted for a substantial proportion of citations…
Researches on the human mobility have made great progress in many aspects, but the long-term and long-distance migration behavior is lack of in-depth and extensive research because of the difficult in accessing to household data. In this paper, we use the resume data to discover the human migration behavior on the large scale scope. It is found that the asymmetry in the flow structure which reflects the influence of population competition is caused by the difference of attractiveness among cities. This flow structure can be approximately described by the gravity model of spatial economics. Bes…
Recently, many empirical studies uncovered that animal foraging, migration and human traveling obey Levy flights with an exponent around -2. Inspired by the deluge of H1N1 this year, in this paper, the effects of Levy flights' mobility pattern on epidemic spreading is studied from a network perspective. We construct a spatial weighted network which possesses Levy flight spatial property under a restriction of total energy. The energy restriction is represented by the limitation of total travel distance within a certain time period of an individual. We find that the exponent -2 is the epidemic …
Despite the long history of modelling human mobility, we continue to lack a highly accurate approach with low data requirements for predicting mobility patterns in cities. Here, we present a population-weighted opportunities model without any adjustable parameters to capture the underlying driving force accounting for human mobility patterns at the city scale. We use various mobility data collected from a number of cities with different characteristics to demonstrate the predictive power of our model. We find that insofar as the spatial distribution of population is available, our model offers…
We examine world migration as a social-spatial network of countries connected via movements of people. We assess how multilateral migratory relationships at global, regional, and local scales coexist ("glocalization"), divide ("polarization"), or form an interconnected global system ("globalization"). To do this, we decompose the world migration network (WMN) into communities---sets of countries with denser than expected migration connections---and characterize their pattern of local (i.e., intracommunity) and global (i.e., intercommunity) connectivity. We distinguish community signatures---"c…
The intrinsic factor that drives the human movement remains unclear for decades. While our observations from intra-urban and inter-urban trips both demonstrate a universal law in human mobility. Be specific, the probability from one location to another is inversely proportional to the number of population living in locations which are closer than the destination. A simple rank-based model is then presented, which is parameterless but predicts human flows with a convincing fidelity. Besides, comparison with other models shows that our model is more stable and fundamental at different spatial sc…
Pulses, waves, and cascades in collective migration dynamics
University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；Complexity Science Hub（复杂性科学中心）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University for Natural Resources and Life Sciences（自然与生命科学大学）
Human movements in the real world and in cyberspace affect not only dynamical processes such as epidemic spreading and information diffusion but also social and economical activities such as urban planning and personalized recommendation in online shopping. Despite recent efforts in characterizing and modeling human behaviors in both the real and cyber worlds, the fundamental dynamics underlying human mobility have not been well understood. We develop a minimal, memory-based random walk model in limited space for reproducing, with a single parameter, the key statistical behaviors characterizin…
Influencing various aspects of human activity, migration is associated also with language formation. To examine the mutual interaction of these processes, we study a Naming Game with migrating agents. The dynamics of the model leads to formation of low-mobility clusters, which turns out to break the symmetry of the model: although the Naming Game remains symmetric, low-mobility languages are favoured. High-mobility languages are gradually eliminated from the system and the dynamics of language formation considerably slows down. Our model is too simple to explain in detail language competition …
Understanding how people move within a geographic area, e.g. a city, a country or the whole world, is fundamental in several applications, from predicting the spatio-temporal evolution of an epidemics to inferring migration patterns. Mobile phone records provide an excellent proxy of human mobility, showing that movements exhibit a high level of memory. However, the precise role of memory in widely adopted proxies of mobility, as mobile phone records, is unknown. Here we use 560 millions of call detail records from Senegal to show that standard Markovian approaches, including higher-order ones…
Predicting human mobility between locations has practical applications in transportation science, spatial economics, sociology and many other fields. For more than 100 years, many human mobility prediction models have been proposed, among which the gravity model analogous to Newton's law of gravitation is widely used. Another classical model is the intervening opportunity (IO) model, which indicates that an individual selecting a destination is related to both the destination's opportunities and the intervening opportunities between the origin and the destination. The IO model established from…
The advent of geographic online social networks such as Foursquare, where users voluntarily signal their current location, opens the door to powerful studies on human movement. In particular the fine granularity of the location data, with GPS accuracy down to 10 meters, and the worldwide scale of Foursquare adoption are unprecedented. In this paper we study urban mobility patterns of people in several metropolitan cities around the globe by analyzing a large set of Foursquare users. Surprisingly, while there are variations in human movement in different cities, our analysis shows that those ar…
User-generated family trees are invaluable for constructing population-scale family networks and studying population dynamics over many generations and far into the past. Family trees contain information on individuals such as birth and death places and years, and kinship ties, e.g., parent-child, spouse, and sibling relationships. Such information about individuals in family trees makes it possible to extract migration networks over time. Despite the recent advances, existing spatial and temporal abstraction techniques for time-variant flow data have limitations due to the lack of knowledge o…
The description of complex human mobility patterns is at the core of many important applications ranging from urbanism and transportation to epidemics containment. Data about collective human movements, once scarce, has become widely available thanks to new sources such as Phone CDR, GPS devices, or Smartphone apps. Nevertheless, it is still common to rely on a single dataset by implicitly assuming that it is a valid instance of universal dynamics, regardless of factors such as data gathering and processing techniques. Here, we test such an overarching assumption on an unprecedented scale by c…
Predicting human mobility patterns has many practical applications in urban planning, traffic engineering, infectious disease epidemiology, emergency management and location-based services. Developing a universal model capable of accurately predicting the mobility fluxes between locations is a fundamental and challenging problem in regional economics and transportation science. Here, we propose a new parameter-free model named opportunity priority selection model as an alternative in human mobility prediction. The basic assumption of the model is that an individual will select destination loca…
In a static environment, optional participation and a local agglomeration of cooperators are found to be beneficial for the occurrence and maintenance of cooperation. In the optional public goods game, the rock-scissors-paper cycles of different strategies yield oscillatory cooperation but not stable cooperation. In this paper, by incorporating population density and individual mobility into the spatial optional public goods game, we study the coevolutionary dynamics of strategy updating and benefit-seeking migration. With low population density and slow movement, an optimal level of cooperati…
The workforce remains the most basic element of social production, even in modern societies. Its migration, especially for developing economies such as China, plays a strong role in the reallocation of productive resources and offers a promising proxy for understanding socio-economic issues. Nevertheless, due to long cycle, expensive cost and coarse granularity, conventional surveys face challenges in comprehensively profiling it. With the permeation of smart and mobile devices in recent decades, booming social media has essentially broken spatio-temporal constraints and enabled the continuous…
Many collective human activities have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. However, the possibility of universal patterns across timing events of researcher migration has barely been explored at global scale. Here, we show that timing events of migration within different countries exhibit remarkable similarities. Specifically, we look at the distribution governing the data of researcher migration inferred from the web. Compiling the data in itself represents a significant advance in the field of quantitative analysis of migration patterns. Official and commercial records are often access …
Human mobility contributes to the fast spatio-temporal propagation of infectious diseases. During an outbreak, monitoring the infection situation on either side of an international border is very crucial as there is always a higher risk of disease importation associated with cross-border migration. Mechanistic models are effective tools to investigate the consequences of cross-border mobility on disease dynamics and help in designing effective control strategies. However, in practice, due to the unavailability of cross-border mobility data, it becomes difficult to propose reliable, model-based…
