title: Scaling and correlation of human movements in cyberspace and physical space.
abstract: Understanding the dynamics of human movements is key to issues of significant current interest such as behavioral prediction, recommendation, and control of epidemic spreading. We collect and analyze big data sets of human movements in both cyberspace (through browsing of websites) and physical space (through mobile towers) and find a superlinear scaling relation between the mean frequency of visit 〈f〉 and its fluctuation σ:σ∼〈f〉^{β} with β≈1.2. The probability distribution of the visiting frequency is found to be a stretched exponential function. We develop a model incorporating two essential ingredients, preferential return and exploration, and show that these are necessary for generating the scaling relation extracted from real data. A striking finding is that human movements in cyberspace and physical space are strongly correlated, indicating a distinctive behavioral identifying characteristic and implying that the behaviors in one space can be used to predict those in the other.
authors.affiliation: Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China and School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA.
authors.forename: Zhi-Dan
authors.initials: ZD
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA and Institute of Computational Physics and Complex Systems and Key Laboratory for Magnetism and Magnetic Materials of MOE, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu 730000, China.
authors.forename: Zi-Gang
authors.initials: ZG
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA and Institute of Computational Physics and Complex Systems and Key Laboratory for Magnetism and Magnetic Materials of MOE, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu 730000, China.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA.
authors.forename: Huan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA and Department of Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA.
authors.forename: Ying-Cheng
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Lai