Population movements based on mobile phone location data: the Czech Republic

ABSTRACT

The paper presents new approaches to the visualisation of origin–destination flows, in which all three basic parameters of flows between pairs of geographic objects are cartographically expressed simply and clearly: the length of flows, their intensity, and the proportional distribution of both directions between pairs of objects (polarisation of flows). The data on population movements based on mobile phone location are used as the input information, which were collected from the whole territory of the Czech Republic. Apart from the visualisation of origin–destination flows, the paper addresses the issue of the transformation of these data through the application of two different interaction measures. The transformed flows are also cartographically visualised and the functional regions based on the respective interaction measures are used as base maps.

KEYWORDS:

• Visualisation of origin–destination flows
• mobile phone location data
• functional regions
• the Czech Republic

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation project ‘Spatial interactions and their conceptualisation: analysis of selectivity, uncertainty and hierarchy’ [number GA20-21360S]. The authors would like to thank the reviewers and the editor for valuable comments regarding the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The self-containment of the region $r$ is expressed as $S{C}_r=T_{rr}/\left({\sum }_k{T}_{rk}+{\sum }_k{T}_{kr}-T_{rr}\right)$

2 We consider a place of residence to be an origin; but of course, flows are bi-directional when people return to their places of residence.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Czech Science Foundation: [grant number GA20-21360S].