How many places do you visit a day?

Abstract

People mobility enormously augmented in the last decades. However, despite the increased possibilities of fast reaching far places, the places that a person commonly visits remain limited in number. The number of visited places of each person is regulated by some laws that are statistically similar among individuals. In our previous work, we firstly argued that a person visit most frequently always few places, and we confirmed that by some initial experiments. Here, in addition to further validating this result, we build a more sophisticate view of the places visited by the people. Namely, on top of our previous work, which identifies the class of Mostly Visited Points of Interest, we define two next classes: the Occasionally and the Exceptionally Visited Points of Interest classes. We argue and validate on real data, that also the occasional places are very limited in number, while the exceptional ones can grow at will, and by the analysis of the classes of visited points we can distinguish the type of users mobility. This paper firstly demonstrates this property in large experimental scenario, and put the basis for new understanding of people places in several areas as localization, social interactions and human mobility modelling.