Uncovering Patterns of Inter-Urban Trip and Spatial Interaction from Social Media Check-In Data

Yu Liu, Zhengwei Sui, Chaogui Kang and Yong Gao

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: The article revisits spatial interaction and distance decay from the perspective of human mobility patterns and spatially-embedded networks based on an empirical data set. We extract nationwide inter-urban movements in China from a check-in data set that covers half a million individuals within 370 cities to analyze the underlying patterns of trips and spatial interactions. By fitting the gravity model, we find that the observed spatial interactions are governed by a power law distance decay effect. The obtained gravity model also closely reproduces the exponential trip displacement distribution. The movement of an individual, however, may not obey the same distance decay effect, leading to an ecological fallacy. We also construct a spatial network where the edge weights denote the interaction strengths. The communities detected from the network are spatially cohesive and roughly consistent with province boundaries. We attribute this pattern to different distance decay parameters between intra-province and inter-province trips.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0086026 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 86026&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0086026

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0086026

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().