Humans are social animals, they interact with different communities of friends to conduct different activities. The literature shows that human mobility is constrained by their social relations. In this paper, we investigate the social impact of a person's communities on his mobility, instead of all friends from his online social networks. This study can be particularly useful, as certain social behaviors are influenced by specific communities but not all friends. To achieve our goal, we first develop a measure to characterize a person's social diversity, which we term community entropy'. Through analysis of two real-life datasets, we demonstrate that a person's mobility is influenced only by a small fraction of his communities and the influence depends on the social contexts of the communities. We then exploit machine learning techniques to predict users' future movement based on their communities' information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the prediction's effectiveness.
More recently, @cite_38 analyze mobility behaviors of pairs of friends and groups of friends (communities). They focus on comparing the difference between individual mobility and group mobility. For example, they discover that a user is more likely to meet a friend at a place where they have not visited before; while he will choose a familiar place when meeting a group of friends.
@cite_38
2078865294 2295520632 2134944993 2110953678
We analyze two large datasets from technological networks with location and social data: user location records from an online location-based social networking service, and anonymized telecommunications data from a European cellphone operator, in order to investigate the differences between individual and group behavior with respect to physical location. We discover agreements between the two datasets: firstly, that individuals are more likely to meet with one friend at a place they have not visited before, but tend to meet at familiar locations when with a larger group. We also find that groups of individuals are more likely to meet at places that their other friends have visited, and that the type of a place strongly affects the propensity for groups to meet there. These differences between group and solo mobility has potential technological applications, for example, in venue recommendation in location-based social networks. With the emerging of location-based social networks, study on the relationship between human mobility and social relationships becomes quantitatively achievable. Understanding it correctly could result in appealing applications, such as targeted advertising and friends recommendation. In this paper, we focus on mining users’ relationship based on their mobility information. More specifically, we propose to use distance between two users to predict whether they are friends. We first demonstrate that distance is a useful metric to separate friends and strangers. By considering location popularity together with distance, the difference between friends and strangers gets even larger. Next, we show that distance can be used to perform an effective link prediction. In addition, we discover that certain periods of the day are more social than others. In the end, we use a machine learning classifier to further improve the prediction performance. Extensive experiments on a Twitter dataset collected by ourselves show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art solution by 30 . In crowded spaces such as city centers or train stations, human mobility looks complex, but is often influenced only by a few causes. We propose to quantitatively study crowded environments by introducing a dataset of 42 million trajectories collected in train stations. Given this dataset, we address the problem of forecasting pedestrians' destinations, a central problem in understanding large-scale crowd mobility. We need to overcome the challenges posed by a limited number of observations (e.g. sparse cameras), and change in pedestrian appearance cues across different cameras. In addition, we often have restrictions in the way pedestrians can move in a scene, encoded as priors over origin and destination (OD) preferences. We propose a new descriptor coined as Social Affinity Maps (SAM) to link broken or unobserved trajectories of individuals in the crowd, while using the OD-prior in our framework. Our experiments show improvement in performance through the use of SAM features and OD prior. To the best of our knowledge, our work is one of the first studies that provides encouraging results towards a better understanding of crowd behavior at the scale of million pedestrians. Even though human movement and mobility patterns have a high degree of freedom and variation, they also exhibit structural patterns due to geographic and social constraints. Using cell phone location data, as well as data from two online location-based social networks, we aim to understand what basic laws govern human motion and dynamics. We find that humans experience a combination of periodic movement that is geographically limited and seemingly random jumps correlated with their social networks. Short-ranged travel is periodic both spatially and temporally and not effected by the social network structure, while long-distance travel is more influenced by social network ties. We show that social relationships can explain about 10 to 30 of all human movement, while periodic behavior explains 50 to 70 . Based on our findings, we develop a model of human mobility that combines periodic short range movements with travel due to the social network structure. We show that our model reliably predicts the locations and dynamics of future human movement and gives an order of magnitude better performance than present models of human mobility.