Diversity of individual mobility patterns and emergence of aggregated scaling laws

Abstract

Uncovering human mobility patterns is of fundamental importance to the understanding of epidemic spreading, urban transportation and other socioeconomic dynamics embodying spatiality and human travel. According to the direct travel diaries of volunteers, we show the absence of scaling properties in the displacement distribution at the individual level,while the aggregated displacement distribution follows a power law with an exponential cutoff. Given the constraint on total travelling cost, this aggregated scaling law can be analytically predicted by the mixture nature of human travel under the principle of maximum entropy. A direct corollary of such theory is that the displacement distribution of a single mode of transportation should follow an exponential law, which also gets supportive evidences in known data. We thus conclude that the travelling cost shapes the displacement distribution at the aggregated level.