SPoT: Representing the social, spatial, and temporal dimensions of human mobility with a unifying framework

Our framework, named SPoT, is able to incorporate the three dimensions-spatial, social, and temporal-of human mobility. The way SPoT does this is by mapping the different social communities of the network into different locations, whose members visit with a configurable temporal pattern. In order to characterize the temporal patterns of user visits to locations and the relative positioning of locations based on their shared users, we analyze the traces of real user movements extracted from three location-based online social networks (Gowalla, Foursquare, and Altergeo). We observe that a Bernoulli process effectively approximates user visits to locations in the majority of cases, and that locations that share many common users visiting them frequently tend to be located close to each other. In addition, we use these traces to test the flexibility of the framework, and we show that SPoT is able to accurately reproduce the mobility behavior observed in traces. Finally, relying on the Bernoulli assumption for arrival processes, we provide a thorough mathematical analysis of the controllability of the framework, deriving the conditions under which heavy-tailed and exponentially-tailed aggregate inter-contact times (often observed in real traces) emerge.