Mobile phone data have recently offered new avenues to quantify human travel patterns with broad applications to epidemiology. But do they provide accurate and reliable descriptions of human movements for epidemic purposes? Through more than 650K simulations applied to France, we showed in a new paper that the adequacy of mobile phone data for infectious disease models becomes higher when epidemics spread between highly connected and heavily populated locations, such as large urban areas: mobile phones are more reliable in central regions than peripheral ones.
 | Comparing the similarity of invasion trees and loyalty. Each panel shows the Jaccard similarity index measured between the epidemic infection tree of the census network and the infection tree of the mobile phone network against the loyalty of the seed node: (a,d) Θin, (b,e) Θout, (c,f) Θtot. Points are scatter plot for each node of the network that seeded the epidemic. Colour gradient, from blue to red, represents increasing values of (a) KCout, (b) KCin, (c) KCtot, (d) TCout, (e) TCin, (f) TCtot. Traffic values are shown on a log scale. |
Assessing the use of mobile phone data to describe recurrent mobility patterns in spatial epidemic models
C Panigutti, M Tizzoni, P Bajardi, Z Smoreda, V Colizza
Royal Society Open Science 4, 160950 (2017).
RSS Feed