A universal model for mobility and migration patterns

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  • 2 November 2011
Abstract
The gravity law, widely used to predict the number of commuters between two geographic locations, plays a central role in epidemic forecast, urban planning and transportation research. Despite its widespread use, it relies on adjustable parameters that vary from region to region and suffers from analytic inconsistencies that are demonstrably at odds with reality. Here we introduce a stochastic process capturing local mobility decisions that helps us analytically derive commuting and mobility fluxes. The resulting radiation model predicts mobility patterns that are statistically indistinguishable from the mobility and transport patterns observed in a wide range of phenomena, from long-term migration patterns to communication volume between different regions. The model predicts an unsuspected scale-invariance in commuting patterns and offers an analytic platform that can absorb system-specific improvements. Given its parameter-free nature, the model can be applied in areas where we lack previous mobility measurements, significantly improving the predictive accuracy of most of phenomena affected by transport, mobility or migration patterns.

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