Characterizing preferred motif choices and distance impacts

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 14; no. 4; p. e0215242
• Main Authors: Cao, Jinzhou, Li, Qingquan, Tu, Wei, Wang, Feilong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 16.04.2019; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Analysis; Architectural engineering; Behavior; Cell Phone; Cellular telephones; Choice (Psychology); Cholera; Commuting; Environmental monitoring; Geographic Information Systems; Human behavior; Human locomotion; Humans; Income distribution; Informatics; Laboratories; Models, Theoretical; Networks; Probability distribution; Psychological aspects; Remote sensing; Scaling; Social networks; Traffic congestion; Urban planning; Wireless telephones; China
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0215242

People's daily travels are structured and can be expressed as networks. Few studies explore how people organize their daily travels and which behavioral principles result in the choices of specific network types. In this study, we first reconstruct location networks and activity networks for numerous individuals from high-resolution mobile phone positioning data and define frequent networks as motifs. The results suggest that 99.9% of people's travels can be characterized by a limited set of location-based motifs and activity-based motifs. The results further reveal that the least effort principle governs the preferred motif choices through quantifying the rank-frequency properties. The scaling properties of distance characteristically impact motifs, and their scaling differences by node numbers and motif types coincide with the popularities of motifs, verifying the self-adaptions in motif choices; that is, although individuals travel with unique propensities, they always tend to choose the motif with the lowest consumption that satisfies their demand.