Explaining the Power-law Distribution of Human Mobility Through Transportation Modality Decomposition

Recent research article titled "Explaining the power-law distribution of human mobility through transportation modality decomposition" was accepted by Nature Scientific Reports (SREP). The 2013 Impact Factor for Scientific Reports is 5.078, according to the 2013 Journal Citation Reports Science Edition (Thomson Reuters, 2014). This places Scientific Reports a top 5 multidisciplinary science primary research journals among Nature, Science, Nature Communications and PNAS, etc.

The key result of the article pertains to explaining the fundamental mechanism behind the Lévy flight characteristics of human mobility. The result is based on decomposing the overall human mobility model into transportation mode specific components. Researchers show that human mobility can be modelled as a mixture of different transportation modes. The result is empirically validated with two large real-life datasets containing from ten to twenty million GPS samples from Beijing, China and Geneva, Switzerland.

The research was carried out at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki in collaboration with researchers from University of Birmingham, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Tongji University. The research was led by Professor Sasu Tarkoma and PhD student Kai Zhao is the first author. A link to the News.