Revealing the fractal and self-similarity of realistic collective human mobility

Jincheng Jiang, Zhihua Xu, Zhenxin Zhang, Jie Zhang, Kang Liu and Hui Kong

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2023, vol. 630, issue C

Abstract: Revealing the fractal scaling laws of collective human mobility is benefit to understand the complexity of collective human mobility behaviours and has broad application prospects, such as infectious disease prevention, because fractal networks are potentially more robust against targeted attacks than non-fractal networks. Although many statistical indicators of individual human mobility had been observed in power-law distributions, there is still no evidence so far to verify the fractal or self-similarity of collective human mobility behaviours. This study uncovered the fractal and self-similarity properties on realistic weighted human mobility networks at world-, nation-, and city-wide scales. After observing the necessary conditions of network fractal, i.e., the evident power-law probability distributions of weight-related metrics, the fractal dimensions of weighted human mobility networks were measured to be about 0.67∼0.88. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrated their distinct statistical self-similarity and approximately structural self-similarity. These exciting findings can enhance the fire-new understandings of collective human mobility behaviours, and provide novel solutions for many real-world applications.

Keywords: Human mobility; Fractal; Self-similarity; Complex network; Power-law; Box-covering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437123007872
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:630:y:2023:i:c:s0378437123007872

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2023.129232

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().