title: Explaining the power-law distribution of human mobility through transportation modality decomposition.
abstract: Human mobility has been empirically observed to exhibit Lévy flight characteristics and behaviour with power-law distributed jump size. The fundamental mechanisms behind this behaviour has not yet been fully explained. In this paper, we propose to explain the Lévy walk behaviour observed in human mobility patterns by decomposing them into different classes according to the different transportation modes, such as Walk/Run, Bike, Train/Subway or Car/Taxi/Bus. Our analysis is based on two real-life GPS datasets containing approximately 10 and 20 million GPS samples with transportation mode information. We show that human mobility can be modelled as a mixture of different transportation modes, and that these single movement patterns can be approximated by a lognormal distribution rather than a power-law distribution. Then, we demonstrate that the mixture of the decomposed lognormal flight distributions associated with each modality is a power-law distribution, providing an explanation to the emergence of Lévy Walk patterns that characterize human mobility patterns.
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland [2] Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, HIIT, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
authors.forename: Mirco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Musolesi
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Pan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hui
authors.affiliation: School of Software Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Weixiong
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland [2] Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, HIIT, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Sasu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tarkoma
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011157:Population Dynamics; D014186:Transportation