Inter-urban mobility via cellular position tracking in the southeast Songliao Basin, Northeast China

Abstract

Position tracking using cellular phones can provide fine-grained traveling data between and within cities on hourly and daily scales, giving us a feasible way to explore human mobility. However, such fine-grained data are traditionally owned by private companies and is extremely rare to be publicly available even for one city. Here, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the largest inter-city movement dataset using cellular phone logs. Specifically, our data set captures 3-million cellular devices and includes 70 million movements. These movements are measured at hourly intervals and span a week-long duration. Our measurements are from the southeast Sangliao Basin, Northeast China, which span three cities and one country with a collective population of 8 million people. The dynamic, weighted and directed mobility network of inter-urban divisions is released in simple formats, as well as divisions’ GPS coordinates to motivate studies of human interactions within and between cities.