Using Spatially Explicit Simulated Data to Analyze Animal Interactions: A Case Study with Brown Hyenas in Northern Botswana

New developments in global positioning systems (GPS) and related satellite tracking technologies have facilitated the collection of highly accurate data on moving objects, far surpassing the ability to analyze them. Within geographic information science, ‘movement pattern analysis’ (MPA) has developed as a subfield that addresses concepts and theories used to explore the spatio‐temporal structure in data, although the methodological and analytical framework associated with MPA is new and still evolving. Interactions between individuals can be considered a second order property of movement and have been far less studied. The nature of interactions between individuals in a population is a fundamental aspect of a species' behavioral ecology and information on the frequency and duration of these interactions is vital to understanding mating and territorial behavior, resource use, and infectious disease epidemiology. The focus of this work was to explore how spatially explicit simulated data can be used to analyse dynamic interactions between individuals. Five different techniques that have been used to quantify dynamic interactions based on GPS data of pairs of individuals were utilised, and all were compared in the context of spatially explicit simulated data intended to represent biologically realistic null models for individual movement, and subsequently paired interactions.     

Extraction of spatio‐temporal data about historical events from text documents

Often, we are faced with questions regarding past events and the answers are hidden in the historical text archives. The growing developments in geographic information retrieval and temporal information retrieval techniques have given new ways to explore digital text archives for spatio‐temporal data. The question is how to retrieve the answers from the text documents. This work contributes to a better understanding of spatio‐temporal information extraction from text documents. Natural language processing techniques were used to develop an information extraction approach using the GATE language processing software. The developed framework uses gazetteer matching, spatio‐temporal relationship extraction and pattern‐based rules to recognize and annotate elements in historical text documents. The extracted spatio‐temporal data is used as input for GIS studies on the time–geography context of the German–Herero resistance war of 1904 in Namibia. Related issues when analyzing the historical data in current GIS are discussed. Particularly problematic are movement data in small scale with poor temporal density and trajectories that are short or connect very distant locations.     

Time‐geographic Derivation of Feasible Co‐presence Opportunities from Network‐constrained Episodic Movement Data

Certain datasets on moving objects are episodic in nature – that is, the data is characterized by time gaps during which the position of the object is unknown. In this article, a model is developed to study the sparsely sampled network‐constrained movement of several objects by calculating both potential and feasible (i.e. more likely) co‐presence opportunities over time. The approach is applied to the context of a static sensor network, where the location of an object is only registered when passing a sensor location along a road network. Feasibility is incorporated based on the deviation from the shortest path. As an illustration, the model is applied to a large Bluetooth tracking dataset gathered at a mass event. The model output consists of maps showing the temporal evolution of the distribution of feasible co‐presence opportunities of tracked visitors over the network (i.e. the number of visitors that could have been present together). We demonstrate the model's usefulness in studying the movement and distribution of a crowd over a study area with relatively few sampling locations. Finally, we discuss the results with a special emphasis on the distinction between feasible and actual presence, the need for further validation and calibration, and the performance of the implementation.     

Mapping areas of asynchronous‐temporal interaction in animal‐telemetry data

Animal interactions are a crucial aspect of behavioral ecology that affect mating, territorial behavior, resource use, and disease spread. Commonly, animals will interact because of shared resources. Recent methods have used time geography to map landscape areas where interactions were possible. However, such methods do not identify areas of less direct interaction, like through smell or sight. These indirect or asynchronous interactions are also a crucial aspect of animal behavioral ecology and affect group behaviors such as leading/following hierarchies and joint resource use. Asynchronous interactions are difficult to map because they can occur in a synchronous space at asynchronous times, as well as in asynchronous spaces at a synchronous time. Here, we present a method termed the temporally asynchronous‐joint potential path area (ta‐jPPA) that maps areas of potential temporally asynchronous–spatially synchronous interactions. We used simulated data to statistically test ta‐jPPA and empirical data to demonstrate how ta‐jPPA can find patterns in habitat use.     

使用点评数据探测城市商业服务设施的发展规律

大众点评网提供的商业设施及其满意度评价数据为城市商业设施的时空分布与发展规律研究提供了一个重要的信息源,它们来源于分布在道路两侧的商业设施。根据此特征,本文设计了一种基于道路网约束的反映商业服务设施与交通网络关系的密度计算方法,对点评数据中蕴含的设施空间分布、设施数量与其满意度之间关系进行了分析。它将商业设施在空间上的二维分布映射至一维的道路网上,更真实地反映了商业服务设施与所处交通环境的影响,揭示了商业服务设施位置、数量及其满意度之间的关系,为城市规划的定量化研究提供了数值依据。     

Building Agent‐Based Walking Models by Machine‐Learning on Diverse Databases of Space‐Time Trajectory Samples

We introduce a novel scheme for automatically deriving synthetic walking (locomotion) and movement (steering and avoidance) behavior in simulation from simple trajectory samples. We use a combination of observed and recorded real‐world movement trajectory samples in conjunction with synthetic, agent‐generated, movement as inputs to a machine‐learning scheme. This scheme produces movement behavior for non‐sampled scenarios in simulation, for applications that can differ widely from the original collection settings. It does this by benchmarking a simulated pedestrian's relative behavioral geography, local physical environment, and neighboring agent‐pedestrians; using spatial analysis, spatial data access, classification, and clustering. The scheme then weights, trains, and tunes likely synthetic movement behavior, per‐agent, per‐location, per‐time‐step, and per‐scenario. To prove its usefulness, we demonstrate the task of generating synthetic, non‐sampled, agent‐based pedestrian movement in simulated urban environments, where the scheme proves to be a useful substitute for traditional transition‐driven methods for determining agent behavior. The potential broader applications of the scheme are numerous and include the design and delivery of location‐based services, evaluation of architectures for mobile communications technologies, what‐if experimentation in agent‐based models with hypotheses that are informed or translated from data, and the construction of algorithms for extracting and annotating space‐time paths in massive data‐sets.     

Human dynamics in space and time: A brief history and a view forward

This article highlights the key intellectual development in human dynamics research, examines the modeling emphases in publications, and argues for research directions in need. Human dynamics research is discussed in two broad directions: spacing time and timing space, to model human activities and interactions. Time is essential to human dynamics research. Space, while often being overlooked, in complement with time is critical to understanding human dynamics because knowing where activities take place is essential to knowing how and why people act and interact. Some interactions allow remote or asynchronized participations, and others require movement to collocate individuals for participating in synchronized activities. A spacing time approach examines the temporal gaps between interactions. A timing space approach investigates the spatial pulses between interactions. Primary research in the spacing time of human dynamics established queueing theories to explain the bursts and heavy‐tailed distribution of human interactions. Although research on the timing space of human dynamics enjoys growing popularity with data from geo‐tagged social media and location‐aware social internet of things (SIoT), its publications remain mostly exploratory. This article suggests a hierarchical framework to systematically study human dynamics and relate findings to build the body of knowledge about human dynamics.     

Integrated compression of vehicle spatio‐temporal trajectories under the road stroke network constraint

With fast growth of all kinds of trajectory datasets, how to effectively manage the trajectory data of moving objects has received a lot of attention. This study proposes a spatio‐temporal data integrated compression method of vehicle trajectories based on stroke paths coding compression under the road stroke network constraint. The road stroke network is first constructed according to the principle of continuous coherence in Gestalt psychology, and then two types of Huffman tree—a road strokes Huffman tree and a stroke paths Huffman tree—are built, based respectively on the importance function of road strokes and vehicle visiting frequency of stroke paths. After the vehicle trajectories are map matched to the spatial paths in the road network, the Huffman codes of the road strokes and stroke paths are used to compress the trajectory spatial paths. An opening window algorithm is used to simplify the trajectory temporal data depicted on a time–distance polyline by setting the maximum allowable speed difference as the threshold. Through analysis of the relative spatio‐temporal relationship between the preceding and latter feature tracking points, the spatio‐temporal data of the feature tracking points are all converted to binary codes together, accordingly achieving integrated compression of trajectory spatio‐temporal data. A series of comparative experiments between the proposed method and representative state‐of‐the‐art methods are carried out on a real massive taxi trajectory dataset from five aspects, and the experimental results indicate that our method has the highest compression ratio. Meanwhile, this method also has favorable performance in other aspects: compression and decompression time overhead, storage space overhead, and historical dataset training time overhead.     

Analyzing Animal Movement Characteristics From Location Data

When individuals of a species utilize an environment, they generate movement patterns at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Field observations coupled with location technologies (e.g. GPS tags) enable the capture of detailed spatio‐temporal data regarding these movement patterns. These patterns contain information about species‐specific preferences regarding individual decision‐making, locational choices and the characteristics of the habitat in which the animal resides. Spatial Data Mining approaches can be used to extract repeated spatio‐temporal patterns and additional habitat preferences hidden within large spatially explicit movement datasets. We describe a method to determine the periodicity and directionality in movement exhibited by a migratory bird species. Results using a High Arctic‐nesting Svalbard Barnacle Goose movement data yielded undetected patterns that were secondarily corroborated with expert field knowledge. Individual revisits by the geese to specific locations in the breeding and wintering grounds of Svalbard, Norway and Solway, Scotland, occurred with a periodicity of 334 days . Further, the orientation of this movement was detected to be mostly north‐south. During long‐range migration the geese use the north‐south oriented Norwegian islands as “stepping stones”, Short‐range movement between mudbank roosts to feeding fields in Solway also retained a north‐south orientation.     

Constructing a Near Real‐time Space‐time Cube to Depict Urban Ambient Air Pollution Scenario

This study adopts a near real‐time space‐time cube approach to portray a dynamic urban air pollution scenario across space and time. Originating from time geography, space‐time cubes provide an approach to integrate spatial and temporal air pollution information into a 3D space. The base of the cube represents the variation of air pollution in a 2D geographical space while the height represents time. This way, the changes of pollution over time can be described by the different component layers of the cube from the base up. The diurnal ambient ozone (O₃) pollution in Houston, Texas is modeled in this study using the space‐time air pollution cube. Two methods, land use regression (LUR) modeling and spatial interpolation, were applied to build the hourly component layers for the air pollution cube. It was found that the LUR modeling performed better than the spatial interpolation in predicting air pollution level. With the availability of real‐time air pollution data, this approach can be extended to produce real‐time air pollution cube is for more accurate air pollution measurement across space and time, which can provide important support to studies in epidemiology, health geography, and environmental regulation.     

Scale-oriented temporal analysis of movement data: A series-based approach

The ubiquity of movement data has led to new research interest in aspects of temporal scale. Few of the approaches analyzing movement data have been developed specifically for scale-oriented temporal analysis. To overcome this limitation, this article proposes a series-based approach to perform scale-oriented temporal analysis of movement data. Key to the proposed approach is the construction of four types of series (one type of identical-scale series and three types of cross-scale series) based on the continuous triangular model (CTM). Two distinct research goals are derived from this: to investigate the changes in motion attributes of moving individuals across different temporal scales, and to detect the time intervals during which active events might have occurred. The results based on real football movement data show that finer changes in motion attributes can be found and more accurate time intervals can be detected through the proposed approach.     

Network Density and the Delimitation of Urban Areas

This paper examines network analysis for urban areas. The research is focused on the problem of definition and visualisation of network geography and network spaces at different scales. The urban scale of analysis is examined and different spatial indices are considered. The built environment of the city is considered as a reference environment for a road network density index. The latter is implemented in order to study the spatial interactions between network phenomena and spaces and to provide further elements for the analysis of urban shape. The study is focused in particular on understanding spatial patterns drawn by networks and in helping with the delimitation of city centres. Different approaches are used to obtain the two indices: a grid–based analysis and a spatial density estimator based on Kernel Density Estimation. The two methodologies are analysed and compared using point data for the urban road network junctions and street numbers as house location identifiers in the Trieste (Italy) Municipality area. The density analysis is also used on road network junctions' data for the city of Swindon (UK) in order to test the methodology on a different urban area.     

Re-examining urban region and inferring regional function based on spatial–temporal interaction

Urban system is shaped by the interactions between different regions and regions planned by the government, then reshaped by human activities and residents’ needs. Understanding the changes of regional structure and dynamics of city function based on the residents’ movement demand are important to evaluate and adjust the planning and management of urban services and internal structures. This paper constructed a probabilistic factor model on the basis of probabilistic latent semantic analysis and tensor decomposition, for purpose of understanding the higher order interactive population mobility and its impact on urban structure changes. First, a four-dimensional tensor of time (T)?×?week (W)?×?origin (O)?×?destination (D) was constructed to identify the day-to-day activities in three time modes and weekly regularity of weekday/weekend pattern. Then we reclassified the urban regions based on the space clustering formed by the space factor matrix and core tensor. Finally, we further analysed the space–time interaction on different time scales to deduce the actual function and connection strength of each region. Our research shows that the application of individual-based spatial–temporal data in human mobility and space–time interaction study can help to analyse urban spatial structure and understand the actual regional function from a new perspective.     

网络空间同位模式的加色混合可视化挖掘方法

同位模式挖掘是空间数据挖掘的热点问题之一,应用领域广泛。已有的同位模式挖掘方法一般采用统计或数据挖掘的方式,要求对复杂的数学公式、算法及相关参数等有深刻的理解,主要针对同质的欧式空间中地理现象。而城市空间中人为地理现象大多发生在网络空间,鉴于此,本文提出了一种网络空间同位模式可视化挖掘方法。该方法利用视觉语言表达网络空间现象之间的影响和交互作用。首先,利用网络空间核密度估计表达网络空间现象的分布情况和影响范围,为网络空间现象的同位模式挖掘提供支持,并建立单个地理现象分布情况与颜色之间的映射;然后基于色光加色混合原理获得两个地理现象相互影响的认知,借以挖掘空间同位模式。本文提出的方法属于形象思维,具有直观,形象和易感受等特点。     

Addressing location uncertainties in GPS‐based activity monitoring: A methodological framework

Location uncertainty has been a major barrier in information mining from location data. Although the development of electronic and telecommunication equipment has led to an increased amount and refined resolution of data about individuals’ spatio‐temporal trajectories, the potential of such data, especially in the context of environmental health studies, has not been fully realized due to the lack of methodology that addresses location uncertainties. This article describes a methodological framework for deriving information about people's continuous activities from individual‐collected Global Positioning System (GPS) data, which is vital for a variety of environmental health studies. This framework is composed of two major methods that address critical issues at different stages of GPS data processing: (1) a fuzzy classification method for distinguishing activity patterns; and (2) a scale‐adaptive method for refining activity locations and outdoor/indoor environments. Evaluation of this framework based on smartphone‐collected GPS data indicates that it is robust to location errors and is able to generate useful information about individuals’ life trajectories.     

Discovering Spatial Patterns in Origin‐Destination Mobility Data

Mobility and spatial interaction data have become increasingly available due to the wide adoption of location‐aware technologies. Examples of mobility data include human daily activities, vehicle trajectories, and animal movements, among others. In this article we focus on a special type of mobility data, i.e. origin‐destination pairs, and present a new approach to the discovery and understanding of spatio‐temporal patterns in the movements. Specifically, to extract information from complex connections among a large number of point locations, the approach involves two steps: (1) spatial clustering of massive GPS points to recognize potentially meaningful places; and (2) extraction and mapping of the flow measures of clusters to understand the spatial distribution and temporal trends of movements. We present a case study with a large dataset of taxi trajectories in Shenzhen, China to demonstrate and evaluate the methodology. The contribution of the research is two‐fold. First, it presents a new methodology for detecting location patterns and spatial structures embedded in origin‐destination movements. Second, the approach is scalable to large data sets and can summarize massive data to facilitate pattern extraction and understanding.     

城市群网络空间交互情景的场源场强分析法

区域网络空间交互已逐渐成为地理学热点研究问题。本文将由城市群形成的城市化区域抽象为地理空间数据场,以城市为场源、城市间的交互作用为场强度量,构建了基于地理空间数据场的城市间多向网络交互情景分析模型。以武汉城市圈为典型区,以城市圈5年时点数据为基础,分析了城市多向网络交互作用及其在区域一体化发展过程中的动态变化。结果表明:武汉城市圈内一核众弱空间格局明显,区域整体交互差异显著不均;2006年后,城市交互强度上升速率有了较大提升,武汉城市圈政策对城市网络交互情景的影响初步显现。     

利用词向量模型分析城市道路交通空间相关性

刻画城市道路之间的交通相关性是提高交通插值及预测水平的基础。现有研究及应用通常假设一定空间或拓扑距离内的道路相互之间具有相关性,这种方式忽视了道路之间交通影响的时空异质性。例如,上游道路交通流通常不会均匀扩散到所有下游道路,而是集中在特定方向上。道路之间产生交通影响和交互作用的根本原因是大量机动车辆穿梭其中。为从数据驱动的角度度量道路之间的交通相关性,从而顾及其时空异质性,本文利用词向量模型Word2Vec从大量机动车出行路径中挖掘道路之间的交通交互影响关系。首先把"路段-路径"类比为"词-文档";其次利用Word2Vec模型从大量路径(文档)中为每条路段(词)训练出一个实数向量(词向量);然后以向量之间的余弦相似度度量对应路段之间的交通相关性;最后利用交通状态数据对结果进行验证。以北京市200万条出租车出行路径为数据进行试验,结果表明:(1)平均水平上,向量相似度越高的邻近路段,其交通状态变化趋势也越相似,证明了本文方法可以正确度量道路之间的交通相关性,并刻画出其空间异质性;(2)工作日早、晚高峰及节假日路段之间的交通相关性大于工作日平峰和周六日,其合理性体现了本文方法可以正确捕捉道路交通相关性的时间异质性。本文方法及分析可为交通规划、诱导等提供方法论和理论基础。     

地理学视角下测绘地理信息再透视

系统回顾了地理信息系统产生以来地理信息内涵发展与拓展的主要历程,指出地理信息的定义一直是在"空间+属性"的地图信息基本框架下逐步扩展,其发展历程经历了地图GIS、语义GIS、时空GIS和大数据GIS 4个不同的阶段,但仍无法满足时空大数据的分析和应用需求。从地理学研究的对象和内容出发,对地理学所需要的"地理信息"的内涵和外延进行了系统的梳理总结,提出了涵盖"空间定位""语义描述""属性特征""几何形态""演化过程""要素相互关系"的地理信息六要素表达模型。在地理定律和地理规律的指导下,面向地理现象空间分布、时空格局、演化过程、相互作用机理的集成表达、系统分析和高效管理,设计了六要素集成表达的几何代数统一GIS数据模型、地理规律与相互作用驱动的新型GIS数据结构、非结构化时空数据组织与存储等关键技术,为测绘地理信息走向地理科学信息提供了另一个理论基础与技术方法支撑,有助于提升GIS对地理格局、演化过程和要素相互作用等地理规律的组织、管理、表达和分析能力。     

Path segmentation for movement trajectories with irregular sampling frequency using space‐time interpolation and density‐based spatial clustering

Path segmentation methods have been developed to distinguish stops and moves along movement trajectories. However, most studies do not focus on handling irregular sampling frequency of the movement data. This article proposes a four‐step method to handle various time intervals between two consecutive records, including parameter setting, space‐time interpolation, density‐based spatial clustering, and integrating the geographic context. The article uses GPS tracking data provided by HOURCAR, a non‐profit car‐sharing service in Minnesota, as a case study to demonstrate our method and present the results. We also implement the DB‐SMoT algorithm as a comparison. The results show that our four‐step method can handle various time intervals between consecutive records, group consecutive stops close to each other, and distinguish different types of stops and their inferred activities. These results can provide novel insights into car‐sharing behaviors such as trip purposes and activity scheduling.