Spatio-Temporal Analytics for Exploring Human Mobility Patterns and Urban Dynamics in the Mobile Age

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Song Gao
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 13921
Author(s):  
Laiyun Wu ◽  
Samiul Hasan ◽  
Younshik Chung ◽  
Jee Eun Kang

Characterizing individual mobility is critical to understand urban dynamics and to develop high-resolution mobility models. Previously, large-scale trajectory datasets have been used to characterize universal mobility patterns. However, due to the limitations of the underlying datasets, these studies could not investigate how mobility patterns differ over user characteristics among demographic groups. In this study, we analyzed a large-scale Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) dataset of the transit system of Seoul, South Korea and investigated how mobility patterns vary over user characteristics and modal preferences. We identified users’ commuting locations and estimated the statistical distributions required to characterize their spatio-temporal mobility patterns. Our findings show the heterogeneity of mobility patterns across demographic user groups. This result will significantly impact future mobility models based on trajectory datasets.


Author(s):  
X. Huang ◽  
J. Tan

Commutes in urban areas create interesting travel patterns that are often stored in regional transportation databases. These patterns can vary based on the day of the week, the time of the day, and commuter type. This study proposes methods to detect underlying spatio-temporal variability among three groups of commuters (senior citizens, child/students, and adults) using data mining and spatial analytics. Data from over 36 million individual trip records collected over one week (March 2012) on the Singapore bus and Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system by the fare collection system were used. Analyses of such data are important for transportation and landuse designers and contribute to a better understanding of urban dynamics. <br><br> Specifically, descriptive statistics, network analysis, and spatial analysis methods are presented. Descriptive variables were proposed such as density and duration to detect temporal features of people. A directed weighted graph G &equiv; (N , L, W) was defined to analyze the global network properties of every pair of the transportation link in the city during an average workday for all three categories. Besides, spatial interpolation and spatial statistic tools were used to transform the discrete network nodes into structured human movement landscape to understand the role of transportation systems in urban areas. The travel behaviour of the three categories follows a certain degree of temporal and spatial universality but also displays unique patterns within their own specialties. Each category is characterized by their different peak hours, commute distances, and specific locations for travel on weekdays.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessia Calafiore ◽  
Nombuyisielo Murage ◽  
Andrea Nasuto ◽  
Francisco Rowe

This paper leverages on the opportunities presented by individual level GPS data to study human mobility. It develops a methodology to understand the spatio-temporal properties of collective movements using network science. Through a spatially-weighted community detection approach, we derived functional neighbourhoods from human mobility patterns from GPS data and analyse the extent to which they vary across time. The results show that while the overall city structure remains stable, functional neighbourhoods tend to contract and expand over the course of the day. This work proposes a methodological framework and emphasises the importance of detecting short-term structural changes in cities based on human mobility.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e276 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Watson ◽  
Zach Gelbaum ◽  
Mathew Titus ◽  
Grant Zoch ◽  
David Wrathall

When, where and how people move is a fundamental part of how human societies organize around every-day needs as well as how people adapt to risks, such as economic scarcity or instability, and natural disasters. Our ability to characterize and predict the diversity of human mobility patterns has been greatly expanded by the availability of Call Detail Records (CDR) from mobile phone cellular networks. The size and richness of these datasets is at the same time a blessing and a curse: while there is great opportunity to extract useful information from these datasets, it remains a challenge to do so in a meaningful way. In particular, human mobility is multiscale, meaning a diversity of patterns of mobility occur simultaneously, which vary according to timing, magnitude and spatial extent. To identify and characterize the main spatio-temporal scales and patterns of human mobility we examined CDR data from the Orange mobile network in Senegal using a new form of spectral graph wavelets, an approach from manifold learning. This unsupervised analysis reduces the dimensionality of the data to reveal seasonal changes in human mobility, as well as mobility patterns associated with large-scale but short-term religious events. The novel insight into human mobility patterns afforded by manifold learning methods like spectral graph wavelets have clear applications for urban planning, infrastructure design as well as hazard risk management, especially as climate change alters the biophysical landscape on which people work and live, leading to new patterns of human migration around the world.


Author(s):  
Qiang Gao ◽  
Fan Zhou ◽  
Kunpeng Zhang ◽  
Goce Trajcevski ◽  
Xucheng Luo ◽  
...  

Understanding human trajectory patterns is an important task in many location based social networks (LBSNs) applications, such as personalized recommendation and preference-based route planning. Most of the existing methods classify a trajectory (or its segments) based on spatio-temporal values and activities, into some predefined categories, e.g., walking or jogging. We tackle a novel trajectory classification problem: we identify and link trajectories to users who generate them in the LBSNs, a problem called Trajectory-User Linking (TUL). Solving the TUL problem is not a trivial task because: (1) the number of the classes (i.e., users) is much larger than the number of motion patterns in the common trajectory classification problems; and (2) the location based trajectory data, especially the check-ins, are often extremely sparse. To address these challenges, a Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) based semi-supervised learning model, called TULER (TUL via Embedding and RNN) is proposed, which exploits the spatio-temporal data to capture the underlying semantics of user mobility patterns. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that TULER achieves better accuracy than the existing methods.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Lenormand ◽  
Thomas Louail ◽  
Oliva G. Cantú-Ros ◽  
Miguel Picornell ◽  
Ricardo Herranz ◽  
...  

Abstract Human mobility has been traditionally studied using surveys that deliver snapshots of population displacement patterns. The growing accessibility to ICT information from portable digital media has recently opened the possibility of exploring human behavior at high spatio-temporal resolutions. Mobile phone records, geolocated tweets, check-ins from Foursquare or geotagged photos, have contributed to this purpose at different scales, from cities to countries, in different world areas. Many previous works lacked, however, details on the individuals’ attributes such as age or gender. In this work, we analyze credit-card records from Barcelona and Madrid and by examining the geolocated credit-card transactions of individuals living in the two provinces, we find that the mobility patterns vary according to gender, age and occupation. Differences in distance traveled and travel purpose are observed between younger and older people, but, curiously, either between males and females of similar age. While mobility displays some generic features, here we show that sociodemographic characteristics play a relevant role and must be taken into account for mobility and epidemiological modelization.


Author(s):  
Yingzi Wang ◽  
Xiao Zhou ◽  
Anastasios Noulas ◽  
Cecilia Mascolo ◽  
Xing Xie ◽  
...  

Chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes are major threats to human life. Understanding the distribution and progression of chronic diseases of a population is important in assisting the allocation of medical resources as well as the design of policies in preemptive healthcare. Traditional methods to obtain large scale indicators on population health, e.g., surveys and statistical analysis, can be costly and time-consuming and often lead to a coarse spatio-temporal picture. In this paper, we leverage a dataset describing the human mobility patterns of citizens in a large metropolitan area. By viewing local human lifestyles we predict the evolution rate of several chronic diseases at the level of a city neighborhood. We apply the combination of a collaborative topic modeling (CTM) and a Gaussian mixture method (GMM) to tackle the data sparsity challenge and achieve robust predictions on health conditions simultaneously. Our method enables the analysis and prediction of disease rate evolution at fine spatio-temporal scales and demonstrates the potential of incorporating datasets from mobile web sources to improve population health monitoring. Evaluations using real-world check-in and chronic disease morbidity datasets in the city of London show that the proposed CTM+GMM model outperforms various baseline methods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Yabe ◽  
Yunchang Zhang ◽  
Satish V. Ukkusuri

AbstractIn recent years, extreme shocks, such as natural disasters, are increasing in both frequency and intensity, causing significant economic loss to many cities around the world. Quantifying the economic cost of local businesses after extreme shocks is important for post-disaster assessment and pre-disaster planning. Conventionally, surveys have been the primary source of data used to quantify damages inflicted on businesses by disasters. However, surveys often suffer from high cost and long time for implementation, spatio-temporal sparsity in observations, and limitations in scalability. Recently, large scale human mobility data (e.g. mobile phone GPS) have been used to observe and analyze human mobility patterns in an unprecedented spatio-temporal granularity and scale. In this work, we use location data collected from mobile phones to estimate and analyze the causal impact of hurricanes on business performance. To quantify the causal impact of the disaster, we use a Bayesian structural time series model to predict the counterfactual performances of affected businesses (what if the disaster did not occur?), which may use performances of other businesses outside the disaster areas as covariates. The method is tested to quantify the resilience of 635 businesses across 9 categories in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Furthermore, hierarchical Bayesian models are used to reveal the effect of business characteristics such as location and category on the long-term resilience of businesses. The study presents a novel and more efficient method to quantify business resilience, which could assist policy makers in disaster preparation and relief processes.


Author(s):  
Lin Sun ◽  
Chao Chen ◽  
Daqing Zhang

The GPS traces collected from a large taxi fleet provide researchers novel opportunities to inspect the urban dynamics in a city and lead to applications that can bring great benefits to the public. In this chapter, based on a real life large-scale taxi GPS dataset, the authors reveal the unique characteristics in the four different trace stages according to the passenger status, study the urban dynamics revealed in each stage, and explain the possible applications. Specifically, from passenger vacant traces, they study the taxi service dynamics, introduce how to use them to help taxis and passengers find each other, and reveal the work shifting dynamics in a city. From passenger occupied traces, they introduce their capabilities in monitoring and predicting urban traffic and estimating travel time. From the pick-up and drop-off events, the authors show the passenger hotspots and human mobility patterns in a city. They also consider taxis as mobile GPS sensors, which probe the urban road infrastructure dynamics.


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