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Lecture

Human Travel Scaling Laws

Description

This lecture discusses the scaling laws of human travel, focusing on the dispersal of bank notes and humans on geographical scales, as well as continuous time random walks and their processes. It covers topics such as Levy flights, fractional Brownian motion, and the application of sub-recoil laser cooling.

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Related concepts (16)

Lévy flight

A Lévy flight is a random walk in which the step-lengths have a stable distribution, a probability distribution that is heavy-tailed. When defined as a walk in a space of dimension greater than one, the steps made are in isotropic random directions. Later researchers have extended the use of the term "Lévy flight" to also include cases where the random walk takes place on a discrete grid rather than on a continuous space. The term "Lévy flight" was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot, who used this for one specific definition of the distribution of step sizes.

Random walk

In mathematics, a random walk is a random process that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some mathematical space. An elementary example of a random walk is the random walk on the integer number line which starts at 0, and at each step moves +1 or −1 with equal probability. Other examples include the path traced by a molecule as it travels in a liquid or a gas (see Brownian motion), the search path of a foraging animal, or the price of a fluctuating stock and the financial status of a gambler.

Fractional Brownian motion

In probability theory, fractional Brownian motion (fBm), also called a fractal Brownian motion, is a generalization of Brownian motion. Unlike classical Brownian motion, the increments of fBm need not be independent. fBm is a continuous-time Gaussian process on , that starts at zero, has expectation zero for all in , and has the following covariance function: where H is a real number in (0, 1), called the Hurst index or Hurst parameter associated with the fractional Brownian motion.

Long-range dependence

Long-range dependence (LRD), also called long memory or long-range persistence, is a phenomenon that may arise in the analysis of spatial or time series data. It relates to the rate of decay of statistical dependence of two points with increasing time interval or spatial distance between the points. A phenomenon is usually considered to have long-range dependence if the dependence decays more slowly than an exponential decay, typically a power-like decay. LRD is often related to self-similar processes or fields.

Lévy process

In probability theory, a Lévy process, named after the French mathematician Paul Lévy, is a stochastic process with independent, stationary increments: it represents the motion of a point whose successive displacements are random, in which displacements in pairwise disjoint time intervals are independent, and displacements in different time intervals of the same length have identical probability distributions. A Lévy process may thus be viewed as the continuous-time analog of a random walk.

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