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The fundamentalmechanisms behind this behaviour has not yet been fully explained. In thispaper, we propose to explain the L\u00e9vy walk behaviour observed in humanmobility patterns by decomposing them into different classes according tothe different transportation modes, such as Walk\/Run, Bike, Train\/Subway orCar\/Taxi\/Bus. Our analysis is based on two real-life GPS datasets containingapproximately 10 and 20 million GPS samples with transportation mode information.We show that human mobility can be modelled as a mixture of different transportationmodes and that these single movement patterns can be approximated by a lognormaldistribution rather than a power-law distribution. Then, we demonstrate thatthe mixture of the decomposed lognormal flight distributions associated witheach modality is a power-law distribution, providing an explanation to theemergence of L\u00e9vy Walk patterns that characterize human mobility patterns.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1038\/srep09136","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2015,3,17]],"date-time":"2015-03-17T02:49:39Z","timestamp":1426560579000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":103,"title":["Explaining the power-law distribution of human mobility through transportationmodality decomposition"],"prefix":"10.1038","volume":"5","author":[{"given":"Kai","family":"Zhao","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Mirco","family":"Musolesi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Pan","family":"Hui","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Weixiong","family":"Rao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Sasu","family":"Tarkoma","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2015,3,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"BFsrep09136_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"016111","DOI":"10.1103\/PhysRevE.79.016111","volume":"79","author":"S Ni","year":"2009","unstructured":"Ni, S. & Weng, W. 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