#Mobile phone data #Mobility #economy #Human behavior

Infrequent activities predict economic outcomes in major American cities

Authors: Shenhao Wang, Yunhan Zheng, Guang Wang, Takahiro Yabe, Esteban Moro & Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland Publication: Nature Cities 10.1038/s44284-024-00051-7. LINK Abstract: Many studies have revealed the predictive power of the most frequent, regular and habitual mobility patterns. However, it remains unclear which components of the mobility patterns contain the most informative signals for predicting disparate economic development across urban areas. Here we use machine learning to predict economic outcomes by analyzing the heterogeneous mobility networks of 687 activities from more than 560,000 anonymized users in Boston, Chicago and Miami. ...

#Mobility #Mobile phone data #Data Science #food #nutrition #accessibility #environments #Human behavior

Effect of mobile food environments on fast food visits

Authors: Bernardo Garcia-Bulle, Abigail L. Horn, Brooke M. Bell, Mohsen Bahrami, Burcin Bozkaya, Alex Pentland, Kayla de la Haye, and Esteban Moro Publication: Nature Communications 15, article number: 2291. LINK Abstract: Poor diets are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Exposure to low-quality food environments saturated with fast food outlets is hypothesized to negatively impact diet. However, food environment research has predominantly focused on static food environments around home neighborhoods and generated mixed findings. ...

#Twitter #Human Behavior

Twitter Session Analytics: Profiling Users’ Short-Term Behavioral Changes

Authors: Farshad Kooti, Esteban Moro, and Kristina Lerman Journal: Proceedings of SocInfo 2016 LINK Abstract: Human behavior shows strong daily, weekly, and monthly patterns. In this work, we demonstrate online behavioral changes that occur on a much smaller time scale: minutes, rather than days or weeks. Specifically, we study how people distribute their effort over different tasks during periods of activity on the Twitter social platform. We demonstrate that later in a session on Twitter, people prefer to per- form simpler tasks, such as replying and retweeting others’ posts, rather than composing original messages, and they also tend to post shorter messages. ...

#stock market #Human behavior #Big Data

Financial markets as empirical labs to study the evolving ecology of human decision making

Human decision making strategies evolve through time based on past experience and they are influence by the spectrum of other strategies with which they come into contact. Financial markets provide the best empirical lab to understand how human decide under risk and uncertainty. They are complex systems which provide massive datasets of detail records of human decisions which constantly evolve and collide in centralized or social structures. Furthermore financial markets provide us with a very simple measure of performance (profits, ROI), thus enabling us to study the relationship between human decision making strategies and performance. ...

#Human behavior #Credit Card Data #Predictability

The predictability of consumer visitation patterns

Authors: Coco Krumme, Alejandro Llorente, Manuel Cebrian, Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland & Esteban Moro Journal: Sci. Rep. 3, 1645; (2013). LINK Abstract: We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is actually highly predictable. Notwithstanding a wide range of individual preferences, shoppers share regularities in how they visit merchant locations over time. ...

#Temporal networks #Human behavior #Mobile Phone Data

Limited communication capacity unveils strategies for human interaction

Authors: Giovanna Miritello, Rubén Lara, Manuel Cebrián and Esteban Moro Journal: Scientific Reports 3, 1950 (2013). LINK Abstract: Social connectivity is the key process that characterizes the structural properties of social networks and in turn processes such as navigation, influence or information diffusion. Since time, attention and cognition are inelastic resources, humans should have a predefined strategy to manage their social interactions over time. However, the limited observational length of existing human interaction datasets, together with the bursty nature of dyadic communications have hampered the observation of tie dynamics in social networks. ...