Dr. Hamdi Kavak: Human Mobility Change in the US During COVID-19

Human Mobility Change in the US During COVID-19

Project Leads

Andreas Züfle
Hamdi Kavak
Taylor Anderson

Student and Senior Collaborators

Justin Elarde (GGS undergraduate -> CDS MS student 2020-2021)
Joonseok Kim (Postdoctoral researcher 2020-2021)

Project Dates

2021

Summary

In this project, we study mobility change in the US through a five-step process using mobility footprint data.

(Step 1) Quantify daily changes in mobility for each US county from 2019-2020.
(Step 2) Conduct Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the change of mobility data to lower-dimensional latent components.
(Step 3) Conduct clustering analysis to find counties that exhibit similar latent components.
(Step 4) Investigate local and global spatial autocorrelation for each component.
(Step 5) Conduct correlation analysis to investigate how various population characteristics and behavior correlate with mobility patterns.

Results show that by describing each county as a linear combination of the three latent components, we can explain 59% of the variation in mobility trends across all US counties. Specifically, change in mobility in 2020 for US counties can be explained as a combination of three latent components: 1) long-term reduction in mobility, 2) no change in mobility, and 3) short-term reduction in mobility. Furthermore, we find that geographically close counties are more likely to exhibit a similar change in mobility. Finally, we observe significant correlations between the three latent components of mobility change and various population characteristics, including political leaning, population, COVID-19 cases and deaths, and unemployment.

Publications & Presentations

Change of human mobility during COVID-19: A United States case study
J. Elarde, J-S. Kim, H. Kavak, A. Züfle, T. Anderson
PLOS One, 2021, 10.1371/journal.pone.0259031
[Paper] [BibTeX]