Urban population mobility patterns in Spring Festival Transportation: Insights from Weibo data

The Spring Festival Transportation (SFT) phenomenon is a mass and high-pressure transportation phenomenon in China, which is also known as the largest periodic human mobility event in history. This large scale population flow reveal many intrinsic problems in the current economic and social development of China, such as the imbalance among regional development, the inefficient distribution of human resources, the limitations posed by the household registration system, and so on. Therefore, to study urban population mobility patterns in the SFT has profound practical significance. As far as we know, most of the existing works focus on the human mobility within the small range of a city, which lacks some of the macroscopic features of a whole society. Some studies in the macroscopic viewpoint, however, are based on the data from population censuses taken every decade, which are highly costly and updated too infrequently to reflect the modern society with its rapid change. In light of this we employ the methodology of complex network to study human mobility on a large scale in a low-cost and real-time manner. Specifically, this paper makes use of the complete Weibo data collected during the 2017 Spring Festival and constructs an urban network of the population flows to visualize the spatio-temporal network structure features of human mobility from a whole society perspective. Moreover, we further explore the relations between human mobility patterns and urban economic development. Our study could give important clues to a more profound understanding about how to guide migration and inform the development of regional and urban economics.