A vector field approach for identifying anomalous human mobility

Abstract Although ordinary human mobility has been extensively studied, anomalous human mobility during emergencies or mass events is not sufficiently understood. The recently proposed vector field approach has shed light on human mobility studies. Here, the authors improve it to analyze anomalous human mobility in mass events. Specifically, the authors develop the anomalous field, the source field, and the dispersion field to identify the crowd gathering location, the start time, and the end time of anomalous human mobility. In addition, the authors propose the decay coefficient and the maximum distance to quantify the influence degree and scope of a mass event. The present approach can be used to capture the spatiotemporal characteristics of human mobility in mass events.