Lévy flights are useful in stochastic measurement, such as biology, human mobility, and financial mathematics, where trajectories contain many short flights and some long flights, and the step-lengths follow a power-law distribution. For cities inhabited by human beings, this paper proposes to use latent factors to study social-economical development trajectories and observes that the trajectories of four Asian cities exhibit Lévy flight characteristics. We collect the social and economical data such as GDP, goods producing industries, population, and general tertiary education, and map these data into social or economical factor through a deep-learning embedding method auto-encoder. We find that the step-lengths of these urban social-economical trajectories can be fitted approximately as a power-law distribution. We use the stochastic multiplicative processes (SMPs) to explain such pattern, wherein the presence of a boundary constraint, the SMP, leads to a power-law distribution. It means that these urban social-economical trajectories follow a Lévy flight pattern, where some years have large changes and many years have little changes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.