Scaling identity connects human mobility and social interactions.
Massive datasets that capture human movements and social interactions have catalyzed rapid advances in our quantitative understanding of human behavior during the past years. One important aspect affecting both areas is the critical role space plays. Indeed, growing evidence suggests both our movements and communication patterns are associated with spatial costs that follow reproducible scaling laws, each characterized by its specific critical exponents. Although human mobility and social networks develop concomitantly as two prolific yet largely separated fields, we lack any known relationships between the critical exponents explored by them, despite the fact that they often study the same datasets. Here, by exploiting three different mobile phone datasets that capture simultaneously these two aspects, we discovered a new scaling relationship, mediated by a universal flux distribution, which links the critical exponents characterizing the spatial dependencies in human mobility and social networks. Therefore, the widely studied scaling laws uncovered in these two areas are not independent but connected through a deeper underlying reality.
Department of Applied Mathematics, Université catholique de Louvain, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Biology and Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115;
Pierre
P
Deville
Department of Physics, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33142;
Chaoming
C
Song
College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115;
Nathan
N
Eagle
Department of Applied Mathematics, Université catholique de Louvain, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;
Vincent D
VD
Blondel
Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Biology and Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115; Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA 02115; Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115;
Albert-László
AL
Barabási
College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 dashunwang@gmail.com.
Dashun
D
Wang
D040421:Cell Phone / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003142:Communication; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D060756:Social Networking
human mobility; mobile phone data; social interactions; social networks; spatial networks