Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 24: Networks: From Topology to Dynamics III (joint DY, BP, SOE)
BP 24.8: Talk
Thursday, March 25, 2010, 12:15–12:30, H44
The tomography of human mobility – what do shortest-path trees reveal? — •Christian Thiemann1,2, Daniel Grady1, and Dirk Brockmann1 — 1Eng. Sci. & Appl. Math, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA — 2Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany
Similar to illustrating the anatomy of organs using pictures of tissue slices taken at various depths, we construct shortest-path trees of different nodes to create tomograms of large-scale human mobility networks. This tomography allows us to measure global properties of the system conditioned on a reference location in the network to gain a fuller characterization of a node. It also suggests a canonical coordinate system for representing complex networks and dynamical processes thereon in a simplified way, revealing a new symmetry in the human mobility networks we investigated. Furthermore, introducing the notion of tree similarity, we devised a new technique for clustering nodes with similar topological footprint, yielding a unique and efficient method for community identification and topological backbone extraction. We applied these methods to a multi-scale human mobility network obtained from the dollar-bill-tracking site wheresgoerge.com and to the U.S. and world-wide air transportation network.