Discovering and Characterizing Mobility Patterns in Urban Spaces: A Study of Manhattan Taxi Data

Lisette Espín Noboa, Florian Lemmerich, Philipp Singer, Markus Strohmaier

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Nowadays, human movement in urban spaces can be traced digitally in many cases. It can be observed that movement patterns are not constant, but vary across time and space. In this work, we characterize such spatio-temporal patterns with an innovative combination of two separate approaches that have been utilized for studying human mobility in the past. First, by using non-negative tensor factorization (NTF), we are able to cluster human behavior based on spatio-temporal dimensions. Second, for characterizing these clusters, we propose to use HypTrails, a Bayesian approach for expressing and comparing hypotheses about human trails. To formalize hypotheses, we utilize publicly available Web data (i.e., Foursquare and census data). By studying taxi data in Manhattan, we can discover and characterize human mobility patterns that cannot be identified in a collective analysis. As one example, we find a group of taxi rides that end at locations with a high number of party venues on weekend nights. Our findings argue for a more fine-grained analysis of human mobility in order to make informed decisions for e.g., enhancing urban structures, tailored traffic control and location-based recommender systems.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWWW 2016 Companion - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages537-542
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781450341448
DOIs
StatePublished - 11 Apr 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event25th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2016 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 11 May 201615 May 2016

Publication series

NameWWW 2016 Companion - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web

Conference

Conference25th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2016
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period11/05/1615/05/16

Keywords

  • human keywords
  • hyptrails
  • tensor factorization

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