Researcher: People are very predictable

BOSTON, March 5 (UPI) -- People's travel habits are so predictable they can be accurately calculated in advance up to 93 percent of the time, says a Boston physicist.

Chaoming Song, a Northeastern University physics doctoral student, said cellphone analysis showed how predictable people are.

"The most surprising thing to us is the lack of variability in predictability across the population, meaning that most all the users have same degree of predictability," regardless of their gender, age, or language spoken, Song said on the LiveScience Web site.

Song is lead author of a study published in the journal Science.

Song and colleagues at Harvard University and China's Chengdu University of Technology tracked the movements of 50,000 anonymous European cellphone users over three months every time the users received a call or text message.

They found most users stayed within 6 miles of their home, while the most predictable users stayed within 2 1/2 miles, making an average of one phone call every 2 hours.

They also found the likelihood the phone users would be at their No. 1 most-visited location was 70 percent.

"So at any point during the day, if the scientists were to predict a participant was at this popular spot, they'd be correct 70 percent of the time," LiveScience said.

Frequent travelers were no less predictable than homebodies, the study found.

Participants were somewhat less predictable on weekends and when they were traveling to and from work or on their lunch break -- but they were still predictable.

The findings could help with traffic and disease control, Song and his colleagues write in their paper.

"At a more fundamental level, they also indicate that, despite our deep-rooted desire for change and spontaneity, our daily mobility is, in fact, characterized by a deep-rooted regularity."