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SYKO: Komplexität

SYKO 1: Complexity

SYKO 1.4: Plenarvortrag

Montag, 9. März 2009, 15:05–15:40, A140

The Scaling Laws of Human Travel: Tracking Dollars for New Approaches to Epidemic Modeling — •Theo Geisel — MPI für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation, Bunsenstr. 10, 37073 Göttingen

Many infectious diseases are transmitted from person to person and human travel is responsible for their geographical spread. In order to model, forecast, and control the spread of epidemics, one needs to know the statistical mechanics of human travel. How can one obtain reliable information on traveling statistics, if people can travel using very different means of transportation from bikes to planes? We have studied this problem empirically using the dispersal of bank notes as a proxy [1]. Dollar bills were tracked based on the dataset of the internet game wheresgeorge.com. Their dispersal can be described very accurately in terms of an ambivalent super- and subdiffusive process in a Lévy random walk model. The model needs 3 parameters only and predicts a spatiotemporal scaling law for the time dependent probability density in very good agreement with the empirical data.

[1] D. Brockmann, L. Hufnagel, and T. Geisel, Nature 439, 462 (2006).