Understanding the relationship between friendship and mobility is crucial to studying the evolution of social networks and modeling human movements. This paper aims to quantify the correlation between social ties and checkins by investigating two location-based social networking websites. It is discovered that the probability of social or checkin’s rank is inversely proportional to the corresponding rank, which implies the potential connection between friendship and mobility. Therefore, the fractions of friends and checkins in the same county at different scales are compared and the Pearson correlation coefficients of users are computed. These results all demonstrate that social friendship correlates closely with human movements.
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