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

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 understanding these clusters, we propose to use HypTrails, a Bayesian approach for expressing and comparing hypotheses about human trails. To formalize hypotheses we utilize data that is publicly available on the Web, namely Foursquare data and census data provided by an open data platform. By applying this combination of approaches to taxi data in Manhattan, we can discover and explain different patterns in human mobility that cannot be identified in a collective analysis. As one example, we can find a group of taxi rides that end at locations with a high number of party venues (according to Foursquare) on weekend nights. Overall, our work demonstrates that human mobility is not one-dimensional but rather contains different facets both in time and space which we explain by utilizing online data. The findings of this paper argue for a more fine-grained analysis of human mobility in order to make more informed decisions for e.g., enhancing urban structures, tailored traffic control and location-based recommender systems.