Uncovering the spatial connection of human mobility based on egocentric networks

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Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
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Date

2021-08-23

Department

Major/Subject

Maryam Kiashemshaki

Mcode

SCI3060

Degree programme

Master’s Programme in Life Science Technologies

Language

en

Pages

54+8

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Abstract

Understanding human mobility patterns has various applications in urban planning, traffic engineering, infectious disease spreading, and emergency management. Temporal characters of mobility networks can be extracted from origin-destination matrices containing complete information on commuting flows. However, analyzing and comparing individuals' daily mobility are not easy tasks. Therefore, it is crucial to find patterns in human mobility to extract helpful information from enormous spatial data. This study aims to cluster cities with similar mobility patterns to discover other similar features for these cities. To achieve this aim, the distribution of destinations of outgoing travelers from a given city and the persistence of these patterns over time are studied. These patterns may be unique for each city; therefore, they are named city signatures. The concept of signature is given from the egocentric network studies, in which the structures of social networks are investigated by studying the communication patterns of individuals. Then, the introduced concept is applied to analyze origin-destination matrices extracted from two anonymized mobile phone datasets (Spanish and Finnish). The city signatures are examined from two perspectives: 1) the difference of cities' signatures from each other, 2) the variation of city signatures in the different periods. For this purpose, distribution characteristics, such as the radius of gyration, entropy, and Gini index, are measured. The results further reveal that the Finnish human mobility patterns are different from the Spanish ones. The city signature in Spain is flatter, while in Finland, it is steeper. This means that in Spain people might travel from any given city to another, whereas in Finland certain cities have more travel between them than others. Additionally, the analysis in the Finnish dataset demonstrates how COVID-19 affects human mobility. The result shows that although human mobility patterns do not noticeably change before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the average distance of trips has reduced. Therefore, it can be concluded that during the COVID-19, individuals have traveled less, and if they traveled, they would go to their local area.

Description

Supervisor

Saramäki, Jari

Thesis advisor

Huang, Zhiren

Keywords

human mobility, city signatures, COVID-19, origin-destination matrix

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https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202108298563

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[dipl] Perustieteiden korkeakoulu / SCI