# Multiscale mobility patterns and the restriction of human movement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.06323 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06323/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Analysing Multiscale Clusterings with Persistent Homology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04281/) (2023)
- [MCbiF: Measuring Topological Autocorrelation in Multiscale Clusterings via 2-Parameter Persistent Homology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14710/) (2025)
- [Robust Markov stability for community detection at a scale learned based on the structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11621/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

From the perspective of human mobility, the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a natural experiment of enormous reach in space and time. Here, we analyse the inherent multiple scales of human mobility using Facebook Movement Maps collected before and during the first UK lockdown. First, we obtain the pre-lockdown UK mobility graph, and employ multiscale community detection to extract, in an unsupervised manner, a set of robust partitions into flow communities at different levels of coarseness. The partitions so obtained capture intrinsic mobility scales with better coverage than NUTS regions, which suffer from mismatches between human mobility and administrative divisions. Furthermore, the flow communities in the fine scale partition match well the UK Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) but also capture mobility patterns beyond commuting to work. We also examine the evolution of mobility under lockdown, and show that mobility first reverted towards fine scale flow communities already found in the pre-lockdown data, and then expanded back towards coarser flow communities as restrictions were lifted. The improved coverage induced by lockdown is well captured by a linear decay shock model, which allows us to quantify regional differences both in the strength of the effect and the recovery time from the lockdown shock.