2008
DOI: 10.1038/nature06958
|View full text |Cite|
|
Sign up to set email alerts
|

Understanding individual human mobility patterns

Abstract: Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period. We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models, human … Show more

Help me understand this report
View preprint versions

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...
1
1
1
1

Citation Types

145
3,422
16
30

Year Published

2008
2008
2020
2020

Publication Types

Select...
6
3

Relationship

0
9

Authors

Journals

citations
Cited by 5,161 publications
(3,613 citation statements)
references
References 28 publications
145
3,422
16
30
Order By: Relevance
“…But a team led by Barabási has now gone one step further, using anonymized mobile-phone data to track the movements of more than 100,000 people over a 6-month period. The statistics, they found, again show the Lévy pattern, although with some additional complexity 4 .…”
Section: Man In the Mirrormentioning
confidence: 73%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…But a team led by Barabási has now gone one step further, using anonymized mobile-phone data to track the movements of more than 100,000 people over a 6-month period. The statistics, they found, again show the Lévy pattern, although with some additional complexity 4 .…”
Section: Man In the Mirrormentioning
confidence: 73%
“…The phenomenon is attracting more and more interest, and it seems to apply to more than just foraging. Research in this week's Nature shows that it applies to the movements of mobilephone users 4 too (see page 779).…”
Section: The Mathematical Mirror To Animal Naturementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Mobile phones are a powerful tool for studying large-scale population dynamics and health on a global scale 12, 16 , revealing the basic patterns of human movement 17 , mood rhythms 18 , the dynamics of the spread of diseases such as malaria 19 , and socioeconomic status in developing countries 20 . Smartphones are now being used globally, with the adoption rate among adults at 69% in developed countries and 46% in developing economies and growing rapidly 21 .…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Last June, Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, published a study in Nature that analysed the movements of 100,000 mobile-phone users 7 . Eagle is now working with Barabási's group and others to examine phone-operator data from a range of geographic areas, including records for millions of mobilephone users in Europe and two East African countries.…”
Section: Our Phones Our Selvesmentioning
confidence: 99%