title: Modelling human mobility patterns using photographic data shared online.
abstract: Humans are inherently mobile creatures. The way we move around our environment has consequences for a wide range of problems, including the design of efficient transportation systems and the planning of urban areas. Here, we gather data about the position in space and time of about 16 000 individuals who uploaded geo-tagged images from locations within the UK to the Flickr photo-sharing website. Inspired by the theory of Lévy flights, which has previously been used to describe the statistical properties of human mobility, we design a machine learning algorithm to infer the probability of finding people in geographical locations and the probability of movement between pairs of locations. Our findings are in general agreement with official figures in the UK and on travel flows between pairs of major cities, suggesting that online data sources may be used to quantify and model large-scale human mobility patterns.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics , University College London, Gower Street , London WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Barchiesi
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics , University College London, Gower Street , London WC1E 6BT, UK ; Warwick Business School , University of Warwick, Scarman Road , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK ; Department of Physics , Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue , Boston, MA 02215, USA.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Preis
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics , University College London, Gower Street , London WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bishop
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics , University College London, Gower Street , London WC1E 6BT, UK ; Warwick Business School , University of Warwick, Scarman Road , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK ; Department of Physics , Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue , Boston, MA 02215, USA.
authors.forename: Helen Susannah
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Moat
keywords: Flickr; complex systems; computational social science; data science; human mobility; social media