Demystifying Levy Walk Patterns in Human Walks
-- Why do humans walk like monkeys?

Injong Rhee

Recent literatures report heavy-tail flight patterns in human mobility over various scales covering meters to several hundred kilometers - a similar pattern observed in animals such as spider monkeys. After studying GPS walk traces of over a hundred people observed over several months, we report two highly probable causes of this pattern, the fractal waypoints (i.e., destination) and least-action tendency of humans. This result facilitates the construction of a realistic human mobility model for many applications including civil engineering for planning roads and pathways in cities, public parks, etc.; disease control for studying virus outbreak spread; telecommunication for planning cell-phone towers and understanding hand-off patterns; animal biology for understanding animal foraging patterns; and sociology for studying the interaction and social network patterns of humans.

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