Articles

Understanding the interplay between social and spatial behaviour

According to personality psychology, personality traits determine many aspects of human behaviour. However, validating this insight in large groups has been challenging so far, due to the scarcity of multi-cha...

Authors: Laura Alessandretti, Sune Lehmann and Andrea Baronchelli

Complex delay dynamics on railway networks from universal laws to realistic modelling

Railways are a key infrastructure for any modern country. The reliability and resilience of this peculiar transportation system may be challenged by different shocks such as disruptions, strikes and adverse we...

Authors: Bernardo Monechi, Pietro Gravino, Riccardo Di Clemente and Vito D. P. Servedio

Are the different layers of a social network conveying the same information?

Comprehensive and quantitative investigations of social theories and phenomena increasingly benefit from the vast breadth of data describing human social relations that is now available within the realm of com...

Authors: Ajaykumar Manivannan, W. Quin Yow, Roland Bouffanais and Alain Barrat

Link transmission centrality in large-scale social networks

Understanding the importance of links in transmitting information in a network can provide ways to hinder or postpone ongoing dynamical phenomena like the spreading of epidemic or the diffusion of information....

Authors: Qian Zhang, Márton Karsai and Alessandro Vespignani

Big data would not lie: prediction of the 2016 Taiwan election via online heterogeneous information

The prevalence of online media has attracted researchers from various domains to explore human behavior and make interesting predictions. In this research, we leverage heterogeneous data collected from various...

Authors: Zheng Xie, Guannan Liu, Junjie Wu and Yong Tan

Blockchain inefficiency in the Bitcoin peers network

We investigate Bitcoin network observing transactions broadcasted into the network during a week from 04/05/2016 and then monitoring their inclusion into the blockchain during the following seven months.We unv...

Authors: Giuseppe Pappalardo, Tiziana Di Matteo, Guido Caldarelli and Tomaso Aste

Shopping mall attraction and social mixing at a city scale

In Latin America, shopping malls seem to offer an open, safe and democratic version of the public space. However, it is often difficult to quantitatively measure whether they indeed foster, hinder, or are neut...

Authors: Mariano G. Beiró, Loreto Bravo, Diego Caro, Ciro Cattuto, Leo Ferres and Eduardo Graells-Garrido

The interhospital transfer network for very low birth weight infants in the United States

Very low birth weight (VLBW) infants require specialized care in neonatal intensive care units. In the United States (U.S.), such infants frequently are transferred between hospitals. Although these neonatal t...

Authors: Munik Shrestha, Samuel V. Scarpino, Erika M. Edwards, Lucy T. Greenberg and Jeffrey D. Horbar

Mining large-scale human mobility data for long-term crime prediction

Traditional crime prediction models based on census data are limited, as they fail to capture the complexity and dynamics of human activity. With the rise of ubiquitous computing, there is the opportunity to i...

Authors: Cristina Kadar and Irena Pletikosa

Is social capital associated with synchronization in human communication? An analysis of Italian call records and measures of civic engagement

Social capital has been studied in economics, sociology and political science as one of the key elements that promote the development of modern societies. It can be defined as the source of capital that facili...

Authors: Marco Mamei, Francesca Pancotto, Marco De Nadai, Bruno Lepri, Michele Vescovi, Franco Zambonelli and Alex Pentland

Human mobility and innovation spreading in ancient times: a stochastic agent-based simulation approach

Human mobility always had a great influence on the spreading of cultural, social and technological ideas. Developing realistic models that allow for a better understanding, prediction and control of such coupl...

Authors: Nataša Djurdjevac Conrad, Luzie Helfmann, Johannes Zonker, Stefanie Winkelmann and Christof Schütte

Understanding coupling dynamics of public transportation networks

Subway and bus networks work as an integrated multiplex transportation system and play an indispensable role in modern big cities. Even though a variety of works have investigated the coupling dynamics of mult...

Authors: Zhihao Zheng, Zhiren Huang, Fan Zhang and Pu Wang

Debye–Hückel theory for refugees’ migration

In this paper, we follow the short-ranged Syrian refugees’ migration to Lebanon as documented by the UNHCR. We propose a model inspired by the Debye–Hückel theory and show that it properly predicts the refugee...

Authors: Sara Najem and Ghaleb Faour

The canary in the city: indicator groups as predictors of local rent increases

As cities grow, certain neighborhoods experience a particularly high demand for housing, resulting in escalating rents. Despite far-reaching socioeconomic consequences, it remains difficult to predict when and...

Authors: Aike A. Steentoft, Ate Poorthuis, Bu-Sung Lee and Markus Schläpfer

On the predictability of the popularity of online recipes

Popularity prediction has been studied in diverse online contexts with demonstrable practical, sociological and technical benefit. Here, we add to the popularity prediction literature by studying the popularit...

Authors: Christoph Trattner, Dominik Moesslang and David Elsweiler

Travelers or locals? Identifying meaningful sub-populations from human movement data in the absence of ground truth

As users of mobile devices make phone calls, browse the web, or use an app, large volumes of data are routinely generated that are a potentially useful source for investigating human behavior in space. However...

Authors: Luca Scherrer, Martin Tomko, Peter Ranacher and Robert Weibel

Extroverts tweet differently from introverts in Weibo

As dominant factors driving human actions, personalities can be excellent indicators to predict the offline and online behavior of individuals. However, because of the great expense and inevitable subjectivity...

Authors: Zhenkun Zhou, Ke Xu and Jichang Zhao

A comparison of spatial-based targeted disease mitigation strategies using mobile phone data

Epidemic outbreaks are an important healthcare challenge, especially in developing countries where they represent one of the major causes of mortality. Approaches that can rapidly target subpopulations for sur...

Authors: Stefania Rubrichi, Zbigniew Smoreda and Mirco Musolesi

Inferences about spatiotemporal variation in dengue virus transmission are sensitive to assumptions about human mobility: a case study using geolocated tweets from Lahore, Pakistan

Billions of users of mobile phones, social media platforms, and other technologies generate an increasingly large volume of data that has the potential to be leveraged towards solving public health challenges....

Authors: Moritz U. G. Kraemer, D. Bisanzio, R. C. Reiner, R. Zakar, J. B. Hawkins, C. C. Freifeld, D. L. Smith, S. I. Hay, J. S. Brownstein and T. Alex Perkins

Social dynamics of financial networks

Recurrent interactions between agents play an essential role in the organization of a dynamic complex system. While intensive researches have been done on social systems formed by human interactions, dynamical...

Authors: Teruyoshi Kobayashi and Taro Takaguchi

Resilience analytics: coverage and robustness in multi-modal transportation networks

A multi-modal transportation system of a city can be modeled as a multiplex network with different layers corresponding to different transportation modes. These layers include, but are not limited to, bus netw...

Authors: Abdelkader Baggag, Sofiane Abbar, Tahar Zanouda and Jaideep Srivastava

Predicting the temporal activity patterns of new venues

Estimating revenue and business demand of a newly opened venue is paramount as these early stages often involve critical decisions such as first rounds of staffing and resource allocation. Traditionally, this ...

Authors: Krittika D’Silva, Anastasios Noulas, Mirco Musolesi, Cecilia Mascolo and Max Sklar

Mapping the international health aid community using web data

International aid is a complex system: it involves different issues, countries, and donors. In this paper, we use web crawling to collect information about the activities of international aid organizations on ...

Authors: Michele Coscia, Katsumasa Hamaguchi, Maria Elena Pinglo and Antonio Giuffrida

Can co-location be used as a proxy for face-to-face contacts?

Technological advances have led to a strong increase in the number of data collection efforts aimed at measuring co-presence of individuals at different spatial resolutions. It is however unclear how much co-p...

Authors: Mathieu Génois and Alain Barrat

Academic performance and behavioral patterns

Identifying the factors that influence academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance of personality traits, class attendance, and social net...

Authors: Valentin Kassarnig, Enys Mones, Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen, Piotr Sapiezynski, David Dreyer Lassen and Sune Lehmann

Network of families in a contemporary population: regional and cultural assortativity

Using a large dataset with individual-level demographic information of almost 60,000 families in contemporary Finland, we analyse the regional variation and cultural assortativity by studying the network betwe...

Authors: Kunal Bhattacharya, Venla Berg, Asim Ghosh, Daniel Monsivais, János Kertész, Kimmo Kaski and Anna Rotkirch

Methods for quantifying effects of social unrest using credit card transaction data

Societal unrest and similar events are important for societies, but it is often difficult to quantify their effects on individuals, hindering a timely and effective policy-making in emergencies and in particul...

Authors: Xiaowen Dong, Joachim Meyer, Erez Shmueli, Burçin Bozkaya and Alex Pentland

Success in books: a big data approach to bestsellers

Reading remains the preferred leisure activity for most individuals, continuing to offer a unique path to knowledge and learning. As such, books remain an important cultural product, consumed widely. Yet, whil...

Authors: Burcu Yucesoy, Xindi Wang, Junming Huang and Albert-László Barabási

Discovering temporal regularities in retail customers’ shopping behavior

In this paper we investigate the regularities characterizing the temporal purchasing behavior of the customers of a retail market chain. Most of the literature studying purchasing behavior focuses on what cust...

Authors: Riccardo Guidotti, Lorenzo Gabrielli, Anna Monreale, Dino Pedreschi and Fosca Giannotti

Feature analysis of multidisciplinary scientific collaboration patterns based on PNAS

The features of collaboration patterns are often considered to be different from discipline to discipline. Meanwhile, collaborating among disciplines is an obvious feature emerged in modern scientific research...

Authors: Zheng Xie, Miao Li, Jianping Li, Xiaojun Duan and Zhenzheng Ouyang

A scalable method to quantify the relationship between urban form and socio-economic indexes

The world is undergoing a process of fast and unprecedented urbanisation. It is reported that by 2050 66% of the entire world population will live in cities. Although this phenomenon is generally considered be...

Authors: Alessandro Venerandi, Giovanni Quattrone and Licia Capra

Collective aspects of privacy in the Twitter social network

Preserving individual control over private information is one of the rising concerns in our digital society. Online social networks exist in application ecosystems that allow them to access data from other ser...

Authors: David Garcia, Mansi Goel, Amod Kant Agrawal and Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

Understanding predictability and exploration in human mobility

Predictive models for human mobility have important applications in many fields including traffic control, ubiquitous computing, and contextual advertisement. The predictive performance of models in literature...

Authors: Andrea Cuttone, Sune Lehmann and Marta C. González

Understanding the predictability of user demographics from cyber-physical-social behaviours in indoor retail spaces

Understanding the association between customer demographics and behaviour is critical for operators of indoor retail spaces. This study explores such an association based on a combined understanding of custome...

Authors: Yongli Ren, Martin Tomko, Flora D Salim, Jeffrey Chan and Mark Sanderson

Temporal patterns behind the strength of persistent ties

Social networks are made out of strong and weak ties having very different structural and dynamical properties. But what features of human interaction build a strong tie? Here we approach this question from a ...

Authors: Henry Navarro, Giovanna Miritello, Arturo Canales and Esteban Moro

Measuring and monitoring collective attention during shocking events

There has been growing interest in leveraging Web-based social and communication technologies for better crisis response. How might the Web platforms be used as an observatory to systematically understand the ...

Authors: Xingsheng He and Yu-Ru Lin

Measuring economic activity in China with mobile big data

Emerging trends in the use of smartphones, online mapping applications, and social media, in addition to the geo-located data they generate, provide opportunities to trace users’ socio-economic activities in a...

Authors: Lei Dong, Sicong Chen, Yunsheng Cheng, Zhengwei Wu, Chao Li and Haishan Wu

Sentiment analysis methods for understanding large-scale texts: a case for using continuum-scored words and word shift graphs

The emergence and global adoption of social media has rendered possible the real-time estimation of population-scale sentiment, an extraordinary capacity which has profound implications for our understanding o...

Authors: Andrew J Reagan, Christopher M Danforth, Brian Tivnan, Jake Ryland Williams and Peter Sheridan Dodds

Are you getting sick? Predicting influenza-like symptoms using human mobility behaviors

Understanding and modeling the mobility of individuals is of paramount importance for public health. In particular, mobility characterization is key to predict the spatial and temporal diffusion of human-trans...

Authors: Gianni Barlacchi, Christos Perentis, Abhinav Mehrotra, Mirco Musolesi and Bruno Lepri

Novel and topical business news and their impact on stock market activity

We propose an indicator to measure the degree to which a particular news article is novel, as well as an indicator to measure the degree to which a particular news item attracts attention from investors. The n...

Authors: Takayuki Mizuno, Takaaki Ohnishi and Tsutomu Watanabe

Gaining historical and international relations insights from social media: spatio-temporal real-world news analysis using Twitter

The immense growth of the social Web, which has made a large amount of user data easily and publicly available, has opened a whole new spectrum for research in social behavioral sciences. However, as the volum...

Authors: Vanessa Peña-Araya, Mauricio Quezada, Barbara Poblete and Denis Parra

Estimating local commuting patterns from geolocated Twitter data

The emergence of large stores of transactional data generated by increasing use of digital devices presents a huge opportunity for policymakers to improve their knowledge of the local environment and thus make...

Authors: Graham McNeill, Jonathan Bright and Scott A Hale

The effect of Pokémon Go on the pulse of the city: a natural experiment

Pokémon Go, a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques, received unprecedented media coverage due to claims that it allowed for greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of peopl...

Authors: Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Leo Ferres, Diego Caro and Loreto Bravo

Data-driven modeling of collaboration networks: a cross-domain analysis

We analyze large-scale data sets about collaborations from two different domains: economics, specifically 22,000 R&D alliances between 14,500 firms, and science, specifically 300,000 co-authorship relations be...

Authors: Mario V Tomasello, Giacomo Vaccario and Frank Schweitzer

Erratum to: Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression

Authors: Andrew G Reece and Christopher M Danforth

Rapid rise and decay in petition signing

Contemporary collective action, much of which involves social media and other Internet-based platforms, leaves a digital imprint which may be harvested to better understand the dynamics of mobilization. Petiti...

Authors: Taha Yasseri, Scott A Hale and Helen Z Margetts

Comparison of traffic reliability index with real traffic data

Existing studies have developed different indices based on various approaches including network connectivity, delay time and flow capacity, estimating the traffic reliability states from different angles. Howe...

Authors: Limiao Zhang, Guanwen Zeng, Shengmin Guo, Daqing Li and Ziyou Gao

The shape of collaborations

The structure of scientific collaborations has been the object of intense study both for its importance for innovation and scientific advancement, and as a model system for social group coordination and format...

Authors: Alice Patania, Giovanni Petri and Francesco Vaccarino

A roadmap for the computation of persistent homology

Persistent homology (PH) is a method used in topological data analysis (TDA) to study qualitative features of data that persist across multiple scales. It is robust to perturbations of in...

Authors: Nina Otter, Mason A Porter, Ulrike Tillmann, Peter Grindrod and Heather A Harrington

Classification of Westminster Parliamentary constituencies using e-petition data

In a representative democracy it is important that politicians have knowledge of the desires, aspirations and concerns of their constituents. Opportunities to gauge these opinions are however limited and, in t...

Authors: Stephen Clark, Nik Lomax and Michelle A Morris