Figure 1

Comparison of the statistical properties of the human mobility in the real and the shuffled data. An illustration to compare (a) the real and (b) the shuffled travel trajectory of a typical cell phone user. Here each node is a location visited by the user, with node size proportional to its visitation frequency. A link is drawn when the user has traveled at least once between the two locations. The shuffled data is obtained by randomly reordering the sequence of visited locations. In this way, the visitation frequency of each location by the user is preserved while the travel trajectory is randomized. (c-f) Scatter plots comparing the statistical properties between the real data and the shuffled data for each user α at the individual level, in terms of (c) the total transited location pairs \(n_{\alpha }^{\mathrm{pairs}}\), (d) the variance \(Var_{\alpha }\) of the traveled frequency of location pairs, (e) the covered distance \(d_{\alpha }^{\mathrm{loop}}\) of the maximum loop, and (f) the total traveled distance \(d_{\alpha }^{\mathrm{total}}\). A box in the standard boxplots are marked in green if the line \(y=x\) lies between 10% and 91% in each bin and in red otherwise. (g-h) Comparison of the statistical properties of the real data and the shuffled data at the collective level, in terms of the distributions of (g) the number of neighboring locations of each location, \(P(k_{i})\) (see (a) for example), and (h) the distribution of population flux between each two locations, \(P(F_{ij})\)