  It is estimated that over 3.6 billion passengers are travelling during the
Chinese Spring Festival travel season. They leave their working cities and
return their hometowns to enjoy annual family time, and back to cities after
the holiday. In this study, with the massive location-based data collected from
millions of smartphone users, we propose a novel method to trace the migration
flow and explore the migration patterns of Chinese people. From the temporal
perspective, we explore the migration trend over time during a 34-days period,
about half a month before and after the Spring Festival. From the spatial
perspective, the migration directions and routes are estimated and quantified,
and the migration flow is visualized. The spatial range of influence of
developed regions could be reflected with the destinations of migration, the
migration destinations and originations have obvious characteristic of
geographical proximity.
