Abstract
With the widespread adoption of locationaware technology, obtaining long-sequence, massive and high-accuracy spatiotemporal trajectory data of individuals has become increasingly popular in various geographic studies. Trajectory data of taxis, one of the most widely used inner-city travel modes, contain rich information about both road network traffic and travel behavior of passengers. Such data can be used to study the microscopic activity patterns of individuals as well as the macro system of urban spatial structures. This paper focuses on trajectories obtained from GPS-enabled taxis and their applications for mining urban commuting patterns. A novel approach is proposed to discover spatiotemporal patterns of household travel from the taxi trajectory dataset with a large number of point locations. The approach involves three critical steps: spatial clustering of taxi origin-destination (OD) based on urban traffic grids to discover potentially meaningful places, identifying threshold values from statistics of the OD clusters to extract urban jobs-housing structures, and visualization of analytic results to understand the spatial distribution and temporal trends of the revealed urban structures and implied household commuting behavior. A case study with a taxi trajectory dataset in Shanghai, China is presented to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed method.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahas R, Aasa A, Silm S, Tiru M (2010). Daily rhythms of suburban commuters’ movements in the Tallinn metropolitan area: case study with mobile positioning data. Transp Res, Part C Emerg Technol, 18 (1): 45–54
Ankerst M, Breunig M M, Kriegel H P, Sander J (1999). Optics: ordering points to identify the clustering structure. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. Philadelphia: ACM, 49–60
Birant D, Kut A (2007). ST-DBSCAN: an algorithm for clustering spatial—temporal data. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 60(1): 208–221
Bogorny V, Renso C, de Aquino A R, de Lucca Siqueira F, Alvares L O (2014). CONSTAnT—A conceptual data model for semantic trajectories of moving objects. Trans GIS, 18(1): 66–88
Dodge S, Weibel R, Forootan E (2009). Revealing the physics of movement: comparing the similarity of movement characteristics of different types of moving objects. Comput Environ Urban Syst, 33 (6): 419–434
Ester M, Kriegel H P, Sander J, Xu X (1996). A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise. In: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Portland: AAAI 226–231
Gao S, Wang Y, Gao Y, Liu Y (2013). Understanding urban traffic-flow characteristics: a rethinking of betweenness centrality. Environ Plann B Plann Des, 40(1): 135–153
Giannotti F, Nanni M, Pinelli F, Pedreschi D (2007). Trajectory pattern mining. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. ACM, 330–339
Guo D, Liu S, Jin H (2010). A graph-based approach to vehicle trajectory analysis. J Locat Based Serv, 4 (3–4) 183–199
Guo D, Zhu X, Jin H, Gao P, Andris C (2012). Discovering spatial patterns in origin—Destination mobility data. Trans GIS, 16(3): 411–429
Han J, Kamber M, Pei J (2011). Data mining: concepts and techniques (3rd Edition). Boston: Morgan Kaufmann, 457–458
Jiang B, Yin J, Zhao S (2009). Characterizing the human mobility pattern in a large street network. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys, 80(2): 021136
Kang C, Sobolevsky S, Liu Y, Ratti C (2013). Exploring human movements in Singapore: a comparative analysis based on mobile phone and taxicab usages. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Chicago: Association for Computing Machinery, 1
Kaufman L, Rousseeuw P J (1990). Finding Groups in Data: An Introduction to Cluster Analysis. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 28–37
Kobayashi T, Shinagawa N, Watanabe Y (1999). Vehicle mobility characterization based on measurements and its application to cellular communication systems. IEICE Trans Commun, 82(12): 2055–2060
Lee J G, Han J, Whang K Y (2007). Trajectory clustering: a partitionand-group framework. In: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data. Beijing: ACM, 593–604
Lee K, Hong S, Kim S J, Rhee I, Chong S (2009). Slaw: a new mobility model for human walks. In: 2009 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM. Rio de Janeiro: IEEE, 855–863
Li Q, Zhang T, Wang H, Zeng Z (2011). Dynamic accessibility mapping using floating car data: a network-constrained density estimation approach. J Transp Geogr, 19(3): 379–393
Li X, Li X, Tang D, Xu X (2010). Deriving Features of Traffic Flow around An Intersection from Trajectories of Vehicles. Beijing: IEEE, 1–5
Liu Y, Kang C, Gao S, Xiao Y, Tian Y (2012a). Understanding intraurban trip patterns from taxi trajectory data. J Geogr Syst, 14(4): 463–483
Liu Y, Wang F, Xiao Y, Gao S (2012b). Urban land uses and traffic ‘source-sink areas’: evidence from GPS-enabled taxi data in Shanghai. Landsc Urban Plan, 106(1): 73–87
Schäfer R P, Thiessenhusen K U, Wagner P (2002). A traffic information system by means of real-time floating-car data. In: Proceedings of the 9th ITS world congress. Chicago, 1–8
Spaccapietra S, Parent C, Damiani M L, De Macedo J A, Porto F, Vangenot C (2008). A conceptual view on trajectories. Data Knowl Eng, 65(1): 126–146
Tietbohl A, Bogorny V, Kuijpers B, Alvares L O (2008). A clusteringbased approach for discovering interesting places in trajectories. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. Fortaleza: ACM, 863–868
Wang W, Yang J, Muntz R (1997). STING: a statistical information grid approach to spatial data mining. In: 23rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. Athens, 186–195
Yuan J, Zheng Y, Xie X, Sun G (2013). T-Drive: enhancing driving directions with taxi drivers’ intelligence. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 25(1): 220–232
Yuan J, Zheng Y, Zhang C, Xie W, Xie X, Sun G, Huang Y (2010). Tdrive: driving directions based on taxi trajectories. In: GIS: Proceedings of the ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. San Jose: ACM, 99–108
Yue Y, Zhuang Y, Li Q, Mao Q (2009). Mining time-dependent attractive areas and movement patterns from taxi trajectory data. In: 2009 17th International Conference on Geoinformatics. Fairfax: IEEE, 1–6
Zhang F, Wilkie D, Zheng Y, Xie X (2013). Sensing the pulse of urban refueling behavior. In: UbiComp 2013-Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. Zurich: ACM, 13–22
Zhang T, Ramakrishnan R, Livny M (1996). BIRCH: an efficient data clustering method for very large databases. In: SIGMOD Record (ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data). Montreal: ACM, 103–114
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mao, F., Ji, M. & Liu, T. Mining spatiotemporal patterns of urban dwellers from taxi trajectory data. Front. Earth Sci. 10, 205–221 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-015-0525-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-015-0525-4