Search

We studied residential clustering and mobility of ethnic minorities using a theoretical framework based on null models of spatial distributions and movements of populations. Using microdata from population registers we compared the patterns of clustering amongst various socioethnic groups living in and around the capital region of Finland. Using the models we were able to connect the factors influencing intraurban migration to the spatial patterns that have been developed over time. We could also demonstrate the interrelationship of the movement and clustering with fertility. The observed clustering seems to be a combined effect of fertility and the tendency to migrate locally. The models also highlight the importance of factors like proximity to the city-centre, average neighbourhood income, and similarity of socioeconomic profiles., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, supporting information

The use of mobile phone call detail records and device location data for the calling patterns, movements, and social contacts of individuals, has proven to be valuable for devising models and understanding of their mobility and behaviour patterns. In this study we investigate weighted exposure-networks of human daily activities in the capital region of Finland as a proxy for contacts between postal code areas during the pre-pandemic year 2019 and pandemic years 2020, 2021 and early 2022. We investigate the suitability of gravity and radiation type models for reconstructing the exposure-networks based on geo-spatial and population mobility information. For this we use a mobile phone dataset of aggregated daily visits from a postal code area to cellphone grid locations, and treat it as a bipartite network to create weighted one mode projections using a weighted co-occurrence function. We fit a gravitation model and a radiation model to the averaged weekly and yearly projection networks with geo-spatial and socioeconomic variables of the postal code areas and their populations. We also consider an extended gravity type model comprising of additional postal area information such as distance via public transportation and population density. The results show that the co-occurrence of human activities, or exposure, between postal code areas follows both the gravity and radiation type interactions, once fitted to the empirical network. The effects of the pandemic beginning in 2020 can be observed as a decrease of the overall activity as well as of the exposure of the projected networks. In general, the results show that the postal code level networks changed to be more proximity weighted after the pandemic began, following the government imposed non-pharmaceutical interventions, with differences based on the geo-spatial and socioeconomic structure of the areas., Comment: Supplementary information appended to manuscript. Contents: 15+3 pages, 5+3 figures, 2+1 tables. Submitted to Frontiers in Physics, Social Physics

We study a system of self-propelled particles (SPPs) in which individual particles are allowed to switch between a fast aligning and a slow nonaligning state depending upon the degree of the alignment in the neighborhood. The switching is modeled using a threshold for the local order parameter. This additional attribute gives rise to a mixed phase, in contrast to the ordered phases found in clean SPP systems. As the threshold is increased from zero, we find the sudden appearance of clusters of nonaligners. Clusters of nonaligners coexist with moving clusters of aligners with continual coalescence and fragmentation. The behavior of the system with respect to the clustering of nonaligners appears to be very different for values of low and high global densities. In the low density regime, for an optimal value of the threshold, the largest cluster of nonaligners grows in size up to a maximum that varies logarithmically with the total number of particles. However, on further increasing the threshold the size decreases. In contrast, for the high density regime, an initial abrupt rise is followed by the appearance of a giant cluster of nonaligners. The latter growth can be characterized as a continuous percolation transition. In addition, we find that the speed differences between aligners and nonaligners is necessary for the segregation of aligners and nonaligners., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures

Humans are social animals and the interpersonal bonds formed between them are crucial for their development and well being in a society. These relationships are usually structured into several layers (Dunbar's layers of friendship) depending on their significance in an individual's life with closest friends and family being the most important ones taking major part of their time and communication effort. However, we have little idea how the initiation and termination of these relationships occurs across the lifespan. To explore this, we analyse a national cellphone database to determine how and when changes in close relationships occur in the two genders. In general, membership of this inner circle of intimate relationships is extremely stable, at least over a three-year period. However, around 1-4% of alters change every year, with the rate of change being higher among 17-21 year olds than older adults. Young adult females terminate more of their opposite-gender relationships, while older males are more persistent in trying to maintain relationships in decline. These results emphasise the variability in relationship dynamics across age and gender, and remind us that individual differences play an important role in the structure of social networks. Overall, our study provides a holistic understanding of the dynamic nature of relationships during the life-course of humans., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

Information on cyber-related crimes, incidents, and conflicts is abundantly available in numerous open online sources. However, processing the large volumes and streams of data is a challenging task for the analysts and experts, and entails the need for newer methods and techniques. In this article we present and implement a novel knowledge graph and knowledge mining framework for extracting the relevant information from free-form text about incidents in the cyberdomain. The framework includes a machine learning based pipeline for generating graphs of organizations, countries, industries, products and attackers with a non-technical cyber-ontology. The extracted knowledge graph is utilized to estimate the incidence of cyberattacks on a given graph configuration. We use publicly available collections of real cyber-incident reports to test the efficacy of our methods. The knowledge extraction is found to be sufficiently accurate, and the graph-based threat estimation demonstrates a level of correlation with the actual records of attacks. In practical use, an analyst utilizing the presented framework can infer additional information from the current cyber-landscape in terms of risk to various entities and propagation of the risk heuristic between industries and countries.

Coordination and cooperation between humans and autonomous agents in cooperative games raises interesting questions of human decision making and behaviour changes. Here we report our findings from a group formation game in a small-world network of different mixes of human and agent players, aiming to achieve connected clusters of the same colour by swapping places with neighbouring players using non-overlapping information. In the experiments the human players are incentivized by rewarding to prioritize their own cluster while the model of agents' decision making is derived from our previous experiment of purely cooperative game between human players. The experiments were performed by grouping the players in three different setups to investigate the overall effect of having cooperative autonomous agents within teams. We observe that the change in the behavior of human subjects adjusts to playing with autonomous agents by being less risk averse, while keeping the overall performance efficient by splitting the behaviour into selfish and cooperative in the two actions performed during the rounds of the game. Moreover, results from two hybrid human-agent setups suggest that the group composition affects the evolution of clusters. Our findings indicate that in purely or lesser cooperative settings, providing more control to humans could help in maximizing the overall performance of hybrid systems., Comment: Chosen to be published in Scientific Reports on 24.05.2021 with DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-90123-8

Using large-scale call detail records of anonymised mobile phone service subscribers with demographic and location information, we investigate how a long-distance residential move within the country affects the mobile communication patterns between an ego who moved and a frequently called alter who did not move. By using clustering methods in analysing the call frequency time series, we find that such ego-alter pairs are grouped into two clusters, those with the call frequency increasing and those with the call frequency decreasing after the move of the ego. This indicates that such residential moves are correlated with a change in the communication pattern soon after moving. We find that the pre-move calling behaviour is a relevant predictor for the post-move calling behaviour. While demographic and location information can help in predicting whether the call frequency will rise or decay, they are not relevant in predicting the actual call frequency volume. We also note that at four months after the move, most of these close pairs maintain contact, even if the call frequency is decreased., Comment: published version in EPJ Data Science

Oscillator networks found in social and biological systems are characterized by the presence of wide ranges of coupling strengths and complex organization. Yet robustness and synchronization of oscillations are found to emerge on macro-scales that eventually become key to the functioning of these systems. In order to model this kind of dynamics observed, for example, in systems of circadian oscillators, we study networks of Van der Pol oscillators that are connected with hierarchical couplings. For each isolated oscillator we assume the same fundamental frequency. Using numerical simulations, we show that the coupled system goes to a phase-locked state, with both phase and frequency being the same for every oscillator at each level of the hierarchy. The observed frequency at each level of the hierarchy changes, reaching an asymptotic lowest value at the uppermost level. Notably, the asymptotic frequency can be tuned to any value below the fundamental frequency of an uncoupled Van der Pol oscillator. We compare the numerical results with those of an approximate analytic solution and find them to be in qualitative agreement., Comment: Updated version of the manuscript submitted to PRE

We present a link-centric approach to study variation in the mobile phone communication patterns of individuals. Unlike most previous research on call detail records that focused on the variation of phone usage across individual users, we examine how the calling and texting patterns obtained from call detail records vary among pairs of users and how these patterns are affected by the nature of relationships between users. To demonstrate this link-centric perspective, we extract factors that contribute to the variation in the mobile phone communication patterns and predict demographics-related quantities for pairs of users. The time of day and the channel of communication (calls or texts) are found to explain most of the variance among pairs that frequently call each other. Furthermore, we find that this variation can be used to predict the relationship between the pairs of users, as inferred from their age and gender, as well as the age of the younger user in a pair. From the classifier performance across different age and gender groups as well as the inherent class overlap suggested by the estimate of the bounds of the Bayes error, we gain insights into the similarity and differences of communication patterns across different relationships.

We analyze a large-scale mobile phone call dataset containing information on the age, gender, and billing locality of users to get insight into social closeness in pairs of individuals of similar age. We show that in addition to using the demographic information, the ranking of contacts by their call frequency in egocentric networks is crucial to characterize the different communication patterns. We find that mutually top-ranked opposite-gender pairs show the highest levels of call frequency and daily regularity, which is consistent with the behavior of real-life romantic partners. At somewhat lower level of call frequency and daily regularity come the mutually top-ranked same-gender pairs, while the lowest call frequency and daily regularity are observed for mutually non-top-ranked pairs. We have also observed that older pairs tend to call less frequently and less regularly than younger pairs, while the average call durations exhibit a more complex dependence on age. We expect that a more detailed analysis can help us better characterize the nature of relationships between pairs of individuals and distinguish between various types of relations, such as siblings, friends, and romantic partners., Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Journal of Computational Social Science (published online, 2019)

In the post year 2000 era the technologies that facilitate human communication have rapidly multiplied. While the adoption of these technologies has hugely impacted the behaviour and sociality of people, specifically in urban but also in rural environments, their "digital footprints" on different data bases have become an active area of research. The existence and accessibility of such large population-level datasets, has allowed scientists to study and model innate human tendencies and social patterns in an unprecedented way that complements traditional research approaches like questionnaire studies. In this review we focus on data analytics and modelling research - we call Social Physics - as it has been carried out using the mobile phone data sets to get insight into the various aspects of human sociality, burstiness in communication, mobility patterns, and daily rhythms., Comment: Review, 38 pages, 8 figures

As a step towards studying human-agent collectives we conduct an online game with human participants cooperating on a network. The game is presented in the context of achieving group formation through local coordination. The players set initially to a small world network with limited information on the location of other players, coordinate their movements to arrange themselves into groups. To understand the decision making process we construct a data-driven model of agents based on probability matching. The model allows us to gather insight into the nature and degree of rationality employed by the human players. By varying the parameters in agent based simulations we are able to benchmark the human behaviour. We observe that while the players utilize the neighbourhood information in limited capacity, the perception of risk is optimal. We also find that for certain parameter ranges the agents are able to act more efficiently when compared to the human players. This approach would allow us to simulate the collective dynamics in games with agents having varying strategies playing alongside human proxies., Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures

Earlier attempts to investigate the changes of the role of friendship in different life stages have failed due to lack of data. We close this gap by using a large data set of mobile phone calls from a European country in 2007, to study how the people's call patterns to their close social contacts are associated with age and gender of the callers. We hypothesize that (i) communication with peers, defined as callers of similar age, will be most important during the period of family formation and that (ii) the importance of best friends defined as same-sex callers of exactly the same age, will be stronger for women than for men. Results show that the frequency of phone calls with the same-sex peers in this population turns out to be relatively stable through life for both men and women. In line with the first hypothesis, there was a significant increase in the length of the phone calls for callers between ages 30 to 40 years. Partly in line with the second hypothesis, the increase in phone calls turned out to be particularly pronounced among females, although there were only minor gender differences in call frequencies. Furthermore, women tended to have long phone conversations with their same-age female friend, and also with somewhat older peers. In sum, we provide evidence from big data for the adult life stages at which peers are most important, and suggest that best friends appear to have a niche of their own in human sociality., Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures

Using a large dataset with individual-level demographic information of 60,000 families in contemporary Finland, we analyse the variation and cultural assortativity in a network of families. Families are considered as vertices and unions between males and females who have a common child and belong to different families are considered as edges in such a network of families. The sampled network is a collection of many disjoint components with the largest connected component being dominated by families rooted in one specific region. We characterize the network in terms of the basic structural properties and then explore the network transitivity and assortativity with regards to regions of origin and linguistic identity. Transitivity is seen to result from linguistic homophily in the network. Overall, our results demonstrate that geographic proximity and language strongly influence the structuring of network., Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures

Family members' life course tendencies to remain geographically close to each other or to migrate due to education or job opportunities have been studied relatively little. Here we investigate migration patterns of parents and their children between 19 administrative regions of Finland from 1970 to 2012. Using the FinnFamily register dataset of 60 000 index individuals and their family members, we investigate the patterns of regional migration and regional co-residence of parents and their children. Specifically, we analyse how likely it is for children to reside in the same region as their parents at any specific age, whether parents and children who live in different regions are likely to reunite, and whether siblings function as regional attractors to each other. Results show an intense regional migration of people to the capital area. The migration propensity of individuals is high in early childhood and peaks in early adulthood. About two thirds of Finnish children live in the same region as their parents throughout their adult lives. Females show higher propensity to migrate than males, since daughters move away from their parents earlier and with a higher rate than sons do. The propensity for two full sibling brothers to be in the same region is higher than that for other types of sibling dyads. We conclude that family members serve as important geographical attractors to each other through the life course and that family attraction is stronger for sons and brothers than for daughters and sisters in contemporary Finland., Comment: 17 pages (14 from the main text and 3 from the SI), 10 figures in the main text, 2 in the SI. 1 table in the main text, 3 in the SI

Timings of human activities are marked by circadian clocks which in turn are entrained to different environmental signals. In an urban environment the presence of artificial lighting and various social cues tend to disrupt the natural entrainment with the sunlight. However, it is not completely understood to what extent this is the case. Here we exploit the large-scale data analysis techniques to study the mobile phone calling activity of people in large cities to infer the dynamics of urban daily rhythms. From the calling patterns of about 1,000,000 users spread over different cities but lying inside the same time-zone, we show that the onset and termination of the calling activity synchronizes with the east-west progression of the sun. We also find that the onset and termination of the calling activity of users follows a yearly dynamics, varying across seasons, and that its timings are entrained to solar midnight. Furthermore, we show that the average mid-sleep time of people living in urban areas depends on the age and gender of each cohort as a result of biological and social factors., Comment: This manuscript includes and extends content from our old manuscript "Seasonal and geographical influence on sleeping patterns inferred from mobile phone data", which was split into two parts due to its length and new investigations added

In human relations individuals' gender and age play a key role in the structures and dynamics of their social arrangements. In order to analyze the gender preferences of individuals in interaction with others at different stages of their lives we study a large mobile phone dataset. To do this we consider four fundamental gender-related caller and callee combinations of human interactions, namely male to male, male to female, female to male, and female to female, which together with age, kinship, and different levels of friendship give rise to a wide scope of human sociality. Here we analyse the relative strength of these four types of interaction using a large dataset of mobile phone communication records. Our analysis suggests strong age dependence for an ego of one gender choosing to call an individual of either gender. We observe a strong opposite sex bonding across most of their reproductive age. However, older women show a strong tendency to connect to another female that is one generation younger in a way that is suggestive of the \emph{grandmothering effect}. We also find that the relative strength among the four possible interactions depends on phone call duration. For calls of medium and long duration, opposite gender interactions are significantly more probable than same gender interactions during the reproductive years, suggesting potential emotional exchange between spouses. By measuring the fraction of calls to other generations we find that mothers tend to make calls more to their daughters than to their sons, whereas fathers make calls more to their sons than to their daughters. For younger people, most of their calls go to same generation alters, while older people call the younger people more frequently, which supports the suggestion that \emph{affection flows downward}., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures