Studies on human mobility have demonstrated that transitions between important locations are highly regular, and that in overall, people spend the majority of their time in a small set of important locations. However, what currently is not known is how regular the movements leading from one location to another are, i.e., how regular is the  route mobility  of individuals. The present paper contributes by conducting the first ever empirical study on regularity of route regularity. We demonstrate that routes indeed contain a high degree of regularity and that the uncertainty associated with a route is concentrated along a small set of so-called fork points. Accordingly, our results suggest that routes can be encoded using a combination of sub-segments with high regularity, and a set of fork points that serve as transition points for the sub-segments. We carry out our analysis using the CabSpotting dataset, which contains mobility traces from 538 cabs in San Francisco metropolitan area collected during one month period.
['Farbod Faghihi', 'Petteri Nurmi']
An empirical study on the regularity of route mobility