Exploring Human Stay Time Patterns from Mobile Phone Data

During the past few years, the penetration of communication systems provides a new perspective to explore the human mobility patterns. In this paper, we use mobile phone data to study the temporal patterns of human mobility in a famous metropolis, Shanghai. More specifically, we focus on the stay time patterns. Thus, understanding the patterns of longest stay time help us to uncover the human travel and stay behaviors. We first show that the longest stay time distributions follow certain log-normal distribution. Through these findings, we further analyze the spatial-temporal patterns of human stay behaviors.