Human mobility, social ties, and link prediction

Our understanding of how individual mobility patterns shape and impact the social network is limited, but is essential for a deeper understanding of network dynamics and evolution. This question is largely unexplored, partly due to the difficulty in obtaining large-scale society-wide data that simultaneously capture the dynamical information on individual movements and social interactions. Here we address this challenge for the first time by tracking the trajectories and communication records of 6 Million mobile phone users. We find that the similarity between two individuals' movements strongly correlates with their proximity in the social network. We further investigate how the predictive power hidden in…