Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Variabilities in Daily Activity-Travel Patterns: A Networked Spatiotemporal Analysis

Interpersonal and intrapersonal variabilities are two important perspectives to understand daily travel behaviors, while only a small number of studies incorporate them for understanding human dynamics. This paper employed a network analysis approach to detecting daily activity-travel patterns of 680 Beijing's residents within a week and then used a multilevel multinomial logit model to analyze the intrapersonal variability in patterns and the socioeconomic linkages behind them. Results suggest that most activity-travel patterns have significant day-to-day intrapersonal and interpersonal variabilities. This suggests that the application of a typical day of activity-travel behaviors to measure and represent a week's or even longer-term behaviors may be biased, due to the existence of day-to-day intrapersonal variability. This study also provides a hint for the selection of days of a week to conduct a diary survey for activity pattern mining or travel demand modeling.

Automated summary

This study used a network analysis approach to detect daily activity-travel patterns of 680 Beijing residents within a week, revealing significant day-to-day intrapersonal and interpersonal variabilities in the patterns. This suggests that applying a typical day of activity-travel behaviors to measure and represent longer-term behaviors may lead to bias.