Grauwin, S;
Szell, M;
Sobolevsky, S;
Hoevel, P;
Simini, F;
Vanhoof, M;
Smoreda, Z;
... Ratti, C; + view all
(2017)
Identifying and modeling the structural discontinuities of human interactions.
Scientific Reports
, 7
, Article 46677. 10.1038/srep46677.
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Abstract
The idea of a hierarchical spatial organization of society lies at the core of seminal theories in human geography that have strongly influenced our understanding of social organization. Along the same line, the recent availability of large-scale human mobility and communication data has offered novel quantitative insights hinting at a strong geographical confinement of human interactions within neighboring regions, extending to local levels within countries. However, models of human interaction largely ignore this effect. Here, we analyze several country-wide networks of telephone calls - both, mobile and landline - and in either case uncover a systematic decrease of communication induced by borders which we identify as the missing variable in state-of-the-art models. Using this empirical evidence, we propose an alternative modeling framework that naturally stylizes the damping effect of borders. We show that this new notion substantially improves the predictive power of widely used interaction models. This increases our ability to understand, model and predict social activities and to plan the development of infrastructures across multiple scales.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Identifying and modeling the structural discontinuities of human interactions |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/srep46677 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1038/srep46677 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10067256 |
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