Multilevel models for analyzing people's daily movement behavior

A survey on the daily movement behavior of the people residing in the territory of the Municipality of Pisa, Italy, was carried out in October 2002. This work is aimed at modeling the distance covered and the number of trips taken in a day as functions of several individual characteristics. In order to take the potential intra-family and intra-area correlation of the observations into account, multilevel models are estimated. We use two and three level hierarchical linear and Poisson models to estimate the number of daily trips taken by an individual. Likelihood ratio tests indicate the movement behavior in 1 day is more alike for individuals within a family than for individuals from different families.