On the properties of human mobility

The current age of increased people mobility calls for a better understanding of how people move: how many places does an individual commonly visit, what are the semantics of these places, and how do people get from one place to another. We show that the number of places visited by each person (Points of Interest - PoIs) is regulated by some properties that are statistically similar among individuals. Subsequently, we present a Pals classification in terms of their relevance on a per-user basis. In addition to the Pols relevance, we also investigate the variables that describe the travel rules among PoIs in particular, the spatial and temporal distance. As regards the latter, existing works on mobility are mainly based on spatial distance. Here we argue, rather, that for human mobility the temporal distance and the Pols relevance are the major driving factors. Moreover, we study the semantic of Pols. This is useful for deriving statistics on people's habits without breaking their privacy. With the support of different datasets, our paper provides an in-depth analysis of Pols distribution and semantics; it also shows that our results hold independently of the nature of the dataset in use. We illustrate that our approach is able to effectively extract a rich set of features describing human mobility and we argue that this can be seminal to novel mobility research. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.