A Universal Model of Commuting Networks

We show that a recently proposed model generates accurate commuting networks on 80 case studies from different regions of the world (Europe and United-States) at different scales (e.g. municipalities, counties, regions). The model takes as input the number of commuters coming in and out of each geographic unit and generates the matrix of commuting flows between the units. The single parameter of the model follows a law that depends only on the scale of the geographic units. We show that our model significantly outperforms an other approach proposing a universal commuting model (Simini et al. (2012)), particularly when the geographic units are small (e.g. municipalities).