Partial correlation between spatial and temporal regularities of human mobility

Abstract

The regularity of human mobility has been extensively studied because of its prominent applications in a considerable number of important areas. Entropy, in addition to many other measures, has long been used to quantify the regularity of human mobility. We adopt the commonly used spatial entropy and develop an analogical temporal entropy to separately investigate the spatial and temporal regularities of human mobility. The underlying data are from an automated transit fare collection system operated by a metropolitan public transit authority in China. The distributions of both spatial and temporal entropies and their dependences on several widely used statistics are examined. The spatial and temporal entropies present a statistically significant correlation, which has not previously been reported to the best of our knowledge.