A Novel Effective Indicator of Weighted Inter-City Human Mobility Networks to Estimate Economic Development

Estimation of economic development in advance is benefit to test the validity of economic policy or to take timely remedial measures for economic recession. Due to the inevitable connections between human mobility and economic status, estimation of economic trend in advance from easily observable big data in human mobility has the superiority of authenticity, timeliness, and convenience. However, high-precision quantitative relations between human mobility and economic growth remain an outstanding question. To this issue, we firstly analyzed and compared the general patterns of human mobility and economic development; then, a novel, simple, and effective hybrid human mobility indicator of weighted human mobility networks was proposed to quantitatively estimate economic growth. HHMi contained two parts, that is, the interaction volumes of a given city with all participation cities and only top hub cities, respectively. This implied that the economic growth of a city is affected by not only its own strength, but also the cooperation with hub cities. Several empirical experiments demonstrated that the proposed HHMIi had an exceedingly high estimation ability of economic growth, especially for the tertiary industry. Compared with other complex network indicators, HHMIi had a distinct advantage and its best accuracy reached 0.9543. These results can provide policy-making supports for inter-city sustainable coordinated development.