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Natural Scales in Geographical Patterns
- Source :
- Scientific Reports, Scientific Reports, Nature Publishing Group, 2017, 7 (45823), ⟨10.1038/srep45823⟩, Scientific Reports, Nature Publishing Group, 2017, 7 (45823), ⟨10.1080/01621459.1971.10482356⟩, Scientific Reports, 7(45823) (2017-04)
- Publication Year :
- 2017
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2017.
-
Abstract
- Human mobility is known to be distributed across several orders of magnitude of physical distances, which makes it generally difficult to endogenously find or define typical and meaningful scales. Relevant analyses, from movements to geographical partitions, seem to be relative to some ad-hoc scale, or no scale at all. Relying on geotagged data collected from photo-sharing social media, we apply community detection to movement networks constrained by increasing percentiles of the distance distribution. Using a simple parameter-free discontinuity detection algorithm, we discover clear phase transitions in the community partition space. The detection of these phases constitutes the first objective method of characterising endogenous, natural scales of human movement. Our study covers nine regions, ranging from cities to countries of various sizes and a transnational area. For all regions, the number of natural scales is remarkably low (2 or 3). Further, our results hint at scale-related behaviours rather than scale-related users. The partitions of the natural scales allow us to draw discrete multi-scale geographical boundaries, potentially capable of providing key insights in fields such as epidemiology or cultural contagion where the introduction of spatial boundaries is pivotal.
- Subjects :
- FOS: Computer and information sciences
0301 basic medicine
Physics - Physics and Society
FOS: Physical sciences
Distribution (economics)
computer science
Network science
Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
Space (commercial competition)
human movement
Article
[INFO.INFO-SI]Computer Science [cs]/Social and Information Networks [cs.SI]
Natural (archaeology)
geographical networks
03 medical and health sciences
network science
community detection
applied mathematics
91D20
91D30
Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
[SHS.STAT]Humanities and Social Sciences/Methods and statistics
Multidisciplinary
business.industry
Orders of magnitude (acceleration)
Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
[SHS.GEO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Geography
Partition (database)
Discontinuity (linguistics)
030104 developmental biology
Geography
business
Scale (map)
Cartography
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 20452322
- Volume :
- 7
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Scientific Reports
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....d80d2a8a0c495d98e98ea327ca6f327f