scholarly journals Integrating Geovisual Analytics with Machine Learning for Human Mobility Pattern Discovery

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Zhang ◽  
Jianlong Wang ◽  
Chenrong Cui ◽  
Yicong Li ◽  
Wei He ◽  
...  

Understanding human movement patterns is of fundamental importance in transportation planning and management. We propose to examine complex public transit travel patterns over a large-scale transit network, which is challenging since it involves thousands of transit passengers and massive data from heterogeneous sources. Additionally, efficient representation and visualization of discovered travel patterns is difficult given a large number of transit trips. To address these challenges, this study leverages advanced machine learning methods to identify time-varying mobility patterns based on smart card data and other urban data. The proposed approach delivers a comprehensive solution to pre-process, analyze, and visualize complex public transit travel patterns. This approach first fuses smart card data with other urban data to reconstruct original transit trips. We use two machine learning methods, including a clustering algorithm to extract transit corridors to represent primary mobility connections between different regions and a graph-embedding algorithm to discover hierarchical mobility community structures. We also devise compact and effective multi-scale visualization forms to represent the discovered travel behavior dynamics. An interactive web-based mapping prototype is developed to integrate advanced machine learning methods with specific visualizations to characterize transit travel behavior patterns and to enable visual exploration of transit mobility patterns at different scales and resolutions over space and time. The proposed approach is evaluated using multi-source big transit data (e.g., smart card data, transit network data, and bus trajectory data) collected in Shenzhen City, China. Evaluation of our prototype demonstrates that the proposed visual analytics approach offers a scalable and effective solution for discovering meaningful travel patterns across large metropolitan areas.

Author(s):  
Elodie Deschaintres ◽  
Catherine Morency ◽  
Martin Trépanier

A better understanding of mobility behaviors is relevant to many applications in public transportation, from more accurate travel demand models to improved supply adjustment, customized services and integrated pricing. In line with this context, this study mined 51 weeks of smart card (SC) data from Montréal, Canada to analyze interpersonal and intrapersonal variability in the weekly use of public transit. Passengers who used only one type of product (AP − annual pass, MP − monthly pass, or TB − ticket book) over 12 months were selected, amounting to some 200,000 cards. Data was first preprocessed and summarized into card-week vectors to generate a typology of weeks. The most popular weekly patterns were identified for each type of product and further studied at the individual level. Sequences of week clusters were constructed to represent the weekly travel behavior of each user over 51 weeks. They were then segmented by type of product according to an original distance, therefore highlighting the heterogeneity between passengers. Two indicators were also proposed to quantify intrapersonal regularity as the repetition of weekly clusters throughout the weeks. The results revealed MP owners have a more regular and diversified use of public transit. AP users are mainly commuters whereas TB users tend to be more occasional transit users. However, some atypical groups were found for each type of product, for instance users with 4-day work weeks and loyal TB users.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Martin Mützel ◽  
Joachim Scheiner

AbstractModern public transit systems are often run with automated fare collection (AFC) systems in combination with smart cards. These systems passively collect massive amounts of detailed spatio-temporal trip data, thus opening up new possibilities for public transit planning and management as well as providing new insights for urban planners. We use smart card trip data from Taipei, Taiwan, to perform an in-depth analysis of spatio-temporal station-to-station metro trip patterns for a whole week divided into several time slices. Based on simple linear regression and line graphs, days of the week and times of the day with similar temporal passenger flow patterns are identified. We visualize magnitudes of passenger flow based on actual geography. By comparing flows for January to March 2019 and for January to March 2020, we look at changes in metro trips under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) that caused a state of emergency around the globe in 2020. Our results show that metro usage under the impact of COVID-19 has not declined uniformly, but instead is both spatially and temporally highly heterogeneous.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamed Faroqi ◽  
Mahmoud Mesbah ◽  
Jiwon Kim

Smart card datasets in the public transit network provide opportunities to analyse the behaviour of passengers as individuals or as groups. Studying passenger behaviour in both spatial and temporal space is important because it helps to find the pattern of mobility in the network. Also, clustering passengers based on their trips regarding both spatial and temporal similarity measures can improve group-based transit services such as Demand-Responsive Transit (DRT). Clustering passengers based on their trips can be carried out by different methods, which are investigated in this paper. This paper sheds light on differences between sequential and combined spatial and temporal clustering alternatives in the public transit network. Firstly, the spatial and temporal similarity measures between passengers are defined. Secondly, the passengers are clustered using a hierarchical agglomerative algorithm by three different methods including sequential two-step spatial-temporal (S-T), sequential two-step temporal-spatial (T-S), and combined one-step spatiotemporal (ST) clustering. Thirdly, the characteristics of the resultant clusters are described and compared using maps, numerical and statistical values, cross correlation techniques, and temporal density plots. Furthermore, some passengers are selected to show how differently the three methods put the passengers in groups. Four days of smart card data comprising 80,000 passengers in Brisbane, Australia, are selected to compare these methods. The analyses show that while the sequential methods (S-T and T-S) discover more diverse spatial and temporal patterns in the network, the ST method entails more robust groups (higher spatial and temporal similarity values inside the groups).


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