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How many days are enough?: capturing routine human mobility
Open accessAbstract
Wedding mobile phone sensor technology and human spatial behaviour has great potential. The ubiquity of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology has made gathering data about human mobility simpler, more precise, and with higher fidelity, providing minute-by-minute records of the locations of cohorts from dozens of participants. While this data provides a strong basis for Geographic Information Science research, it also constitutes an invasion of the participants' privacy and can provide more information than researchers require to answer their questions. As an ethical and practical consideration, researchers should gather only as much data as they need. In this paper, we take three weeks of GPS traces from over a hundred student participants in mobile phone-based tracking studies and show that fewer than 14 days of data is necessary to establish complete activity spaces. We define 'complete' as the point at which marginal information gains become negligible according to a pairwise temporal analysis of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of the spatial (bivariate) histogram through time. For the fixed level of information difference, observable in the data, impacts due to individual variability, population composition, and spatial resolution are evident. However, all populations at each level of resolution examined in the paper demonstrated convergence to low divergence levels occurred within a matter of days, and to negligible information gain in less than two weeks. The methods described in the paper represent a novel metric useful to understand the interaction between measurements and information in human mobility.
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“Additionally, research indicates that at least 14 days of data are required to capture routine individual mobility patterns (Stanley et al. 2018).”
From Visitation patterns across mobility groups: wandering, commuting, and exploring (2026) · cites this paper as Stanley et al. 2018
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Sorted by citations
Visitation patterns across mobility groups: wandering, commuting, and exploring
Hołubowska, O., Smolak, K., Brum-Bastos, V., & Sila-Nowicka, K. (2026) · Journal of Geographical Systems · doi:10.1007/s10109-026-00501-x
Metadata
- Authors
- Stanley, K., Yoo, E.-H., Paul, T., & Bell, S.
- Affiliations
- University of Saskatchewan (CA)
- University at Buffalo, State University of New York (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bell, Scott
- Venue
- International Journal of Geographical Information Science
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2018-04-25
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 1485-1504
- ISSN
- 0269-3798 (ISSN-L)
- 1365-8816
- 1362-3087
- PMC
- PMC6677398
- OpenAlex
- W2799933947
- Cited by
- 42
- References
- 38
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 2
- FWCI
- 5.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- International Journal of Geographical Information Systems (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant Number RGPIN-2015-06318)
- National Institutes for Health (Grant Number R01GM108731)
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant Number 895-2012-1023)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Transportation › Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Data Management and Algorithms
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
- Keywords
- human mobility, GPS tracks, activity space, data minimization, privacy, Kullback-Leibler divergence, spatial histograms, temporal analysis, mobile phone tracking, information gain, spatial resolution
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