Generating urban road intersection models from low-frequency GPS trajectory data

Detailed real-time road data are an important prerequisite for navigation and intelligent transportation systems. As accident-prone areas, road intersections play a critical role in route guidance and traffic management. Ubiquitous trajectory data have led to a recent surge in road map reconstruction. However, it is still challenging to automatically generate detailed structural models for road intersections, especially from low-frequency trajectory data. We propose a novel three-step approach to extract the structural and semantic information of road intersections from low-frequency trajectories. The spatial coverage of road intersections is first detected based on hotspot analysis and triangulation-based point clustering. Next, an improved hierarchical trajectory clustering algorithm is designed to adaptively extract the turning modes and traffic rules of road intersections. Finally, structural models are generated via K-segment fitting and common subsequence merging. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can efficiently handle low-frequency, unstable trajectory data and accurately extract the structural and semantic features of road intersections. Therefore, the proposed method provides a promising solution for enriching and updating routable road data.     

Identifying primary public transit corridors using multi-source big transit data

ABSTRACT

Effective public transit planning needs to address realistic travel demands, which can be illustrated by corridors across major residential areas and activity centers. It is vital to identify public transit corridors that contain the most significant transit travel demand patterns. We propose a two-stage approach to discover primary public transit corridors at high spatio-temporal resolutions using massive real-world smart card and bus trajectory data, which manifest rich transit demand patterns over space and time. The first stage was to reconstruct chained trips for individual passengers using multi-source massive public transit data. In the second stage, a shared-flow clustering algorithm was developed to identify public transit corridors based on reconstructed individual transit trips. The proposed approach was evaluated using transit data collected in Shenzhen, China. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach is a practical tool for extracting time-varying corridors for many potential applications, such as transit planning and management.     

基于微博数据的北京市热点区域意象感知

“城市意象”研究对城市文化感知、城市管理与规划、旅游资源开发等具有重要意义。近年来,随着智能移动终端和社交媒体的普及,产生了大量城市内包含有文本和地理位置等信息的社交媒体数据,涉及城市的各个区域,为开展城市意象的综合感知研究提供了新的途径。本文以2016年北京市带位置签到的新浪微博数据为例,在空间聚类发现热点区域的基础上,采用词频—逆文件频率(TF-IDF)与文档主题生成模型LDA两类典型的文本分析的方法,挖掘城市不同热点区域的主题,以感知北京市不同热点区域的社会文化功能和人群行为,并在此基础上通过对热点区域高频主题词进行共词聚类分析,深度挖掘北京市的总体意象。研究表明,运用文本挖掘及地理大数据分析的城市意象研究方法,能及时感知人群在城市不同场所的活动、态度、偏好,从而揭示城市的社会文化及功能特征,是对刻画城市物质形态的城市意象五要素模型的重要补充。此外,以北京市热点区域为例的实证研究结果对现实中的城市特色传承与空间品质塑造等有一定的启发意义。     

Two-stage permutation tests for determining homogeneity within a spatial cluster

The discovery of spatial clusters formed by proximal spatial units with similar non-spatial attribute values plays an important role in spatial data analysis. Although several spatial contiguity-constrained clustering methods are currently available, almost all of them discover clusters in a geographical dataset, even though the dataset has no natural clustering structure. Statistically evaluating the significance of the degree of homogeneity within a single spatial cluster is difficult. To overcome this limitation, this study develops a permutation test approach Specifically, the homogeneity of a spatial cluster is measured based on the local variance and cluster member permutation, and two-stage permutation tests are developed to determine the significance of the degree of homogeneity within each spatial cluster. The proposed permutation tests can be integrated into the existing spatial clustering algorithms to detect homogeneous spatial clusters. The proposed tests are compared with four existing tests (i.e., Park’s test, the contiguity-constrained nonparametric analysis of variance (COCOPAN) method, spatial scan statistic, and q-statistic) using two simulated and two meteorological datasets. The comparison shows that the proposed two-stage permutation tests are more effective to identify homogeneous spatial clusters and to determine homogeneous clustering structures in practical applications.     

基于共享单车轨迹的精细路网更新方法

城市道路数据的完整性和实时性是保障位置服务和规划导航路径的关键支撑。该文提出一种基于共享单车轨迹数据的新增自行车骑行道路自动检测和更新方法:首先,结合缓冲区方法和轨迹—路网几何特征检测增量轨迹;其次,基于分段—聚类—聚合策略提取更新路段,利用多特征融合密度聚类算法与最小外包矩形骨架线法提取增量道路中心线;最后,基于拓扑规则完成道路更新。以广州市共享单车轨迹为例,将该方法与传统栅格细化法进行实验对比,结果表明:该方法能有效更新道路网络,且在2 m和5 m精细尺度范围内提取的新增道路覆盖精度提升14%左右;在7 m尺度下精度达90%以上,在10 m尺度下精度达96%以上。     

基于轨迹数据场的热点区域提取及空间交互分析——以深圳市为例

以深圳市出租车GPS数据为基础,运用时空拓展的轨迹数据场聚类方法提取城市交通热点区域,结合城市POI(Point of Interest)数据和地理实况对热点区域加以理解和分析。基于复杂网络的视角,计算交互分析指标并可视化热点区域的空间交互网络,探究城市交通和居民出行的时空规律。结果表明:1)交通枢纽(机场、火车站和口岸)、综合性商圈、城市重要主干道周边和城市商务中心在节假日和工作日均表现为持续热点区域;2)节假日热点区域分布较"发散",主要反映了居民个性化出行需求;3)工作日热点区域分布较"收敛",主要表现为职住分离的通勤模式;4)不同热点区域在空间交互网络中的重要性存在明显差异,其空间交互体现了距离衰减效应和局部抱团现象,居民出行的热点区域网络本身具有小世界效应和无标度特征。     

Robust inferences of travel paths from GPS trajectories

Monitoring and predicting traffic conditions are of utmost importance in reacting to emergency events in time and for computing the real-time shortest travel-time path. Mobile sensors, such as GPS devices and smartphones, are useful for monitoring urban traffic due to their large coverage area and ease of deployment. Many researchers have employed such sensed data to model and predict traffic conditions. To do so, we first have to address the problem of associating GPS trajectories with the road network in a robust manner. Existing methods rely on point-by-point matching to map individual GPS points to a road segment. However, GPS data is imprecise due to noise in GPS signals. GPS coordinates can have errors of several meters and, therefore, direct mapping of individual points is error prone. Acknowledging that every GPS point is potentially noisy, we propose a radically different approach to overcome inaccuracy in GPS data. Instead of focusing on a point-by-point approach, our proposed method considers the set of relevant GPS points in a trajectory that can be mapped together to a road segment. This clustering approach gives us a macroscopic view of the GPS trajectories even under very noisy conditions. Our method clusters points based on the direction of movement as a spatial-linear cluster, ranks the possible route segments in the graph for each group, and searches for the best combination of segments as the overall path for the given set of GPS points. Through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, we demonstrate that, even with highly noisy GPS measurements, our proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and computational cost.     

城市交通热点区域的空间交互网络分析

城市热点区域是人们频繁活动的体现,利用人们的出行可构建空间交互网络。目前的相关研究主要集中于对热点提取方法及其动态变化的研究,对交通热点的交互作用及其构成的空间交互网络的研究还很少。本文以武汉市的出租车轨迹为数据源,利用基于时空数据场的聚类方法提取城市交通热点区域;基于复杂网络理论与方法,分析城市交通热点区域之间的空间交互作用。通过研究发现：①节假日,热点区域之间的往返交互较多;工作日,热点区域之间的交互较少;②节假日,影响力较大的节点为车站、机场等;工作日,影响力较大的节点是社区和工作地;③社团探测发现,工作日跨越长江的交互较多,非工作日跨越长江的交互较少。上述研究结论可为交通管理部门针对节假日和工作日分别制定不同的交通管理政策和方法提供参考。     

基于GIS场模型的城市餐饮服务热点探测及空间格局分析

餐饮服务是城市生活的重要组成部分,提取城市餐饮服务热点并识别其空间分布模式,对于理解城市形态结构具有重要意义。针对过去基于POI进行城市形态特征定量分析的不足,利用GIS场模型对城市特征要素的空间分布模式进行识别,并采用地学信息图谱对其模式进行可视化和分析。以济南市主城区4.71万个餐饮服务POI作为主要数据源,首先基于密度场热点探测模型提取餐饮服务热点并按照密度值进行等级划分;然后采用广义对称结构图谱和数字场层次结构图谱表达餐饮服务热点的空间分布结构特征和规模等级结构特征,并构建其分布模式图谱;最后对结果展开讨论。研究表明：① 数字场热点探测模型能够有效地从POI中识别出不同等级的热点。② 广义对称结构图谱和基于GIS场模型的层级结构图谱能够分别从纵横两个方面分析和表达餐饮热点的空间分布结构和层次等级结构特征。综上所述,本研究为基于POI的城市特征要素提取和城市形态研究提供了一种有效的定量分析思路,其方法也可以推广至其他城市特征要素的提取、分析和表达当中。     

A density-based approach for detecting network-constrained clusters in spatial point events

Existing spatial clustering methods primarily focus on points distributed in planar space. However, occurrence locations and background processes of most human mobility events within cities are constrained by the road network space. Here we describe a density-based clustering approach for objectively detecting clusters in network-constrained point events. First, the network-constrained Delaunay triangulation is constructed to facilitate the measurement of network distances between points. Then, a combination of network kernel density estimation and potential entropy is executed to determine the optimal neighbourhood size. Furthermore, all network-constrained events are tested under a null hypothesis to statistically identify core points with significantly high densities. Finally, spatial clusters can be formed by expanding from the identified core points. Experimental comparisons performed on the origin and destination points of taxis in Beijing demonstrate that the proposed method can ascertain network-constrained clusters precisely and significantly. The resulting time-dependent patterns of clusters will be informative for taxi route selections in the future.     

Detecting ethnic residential clusters using an optimisation clustering method

To understand residential clustering of contemporary immigrants and other ethnic minorities in urban areas, it is important to first identify where they are clustered. In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the use of local statistics as a tool for finding the location of racial/ethnic residential clusters. However, since many existing local statistics are primarily developed for epidemiological studies where clustering is associated with relatively rare events, its application in studies of residential segregation may not always yield satisfactory results. This article proposes an optimisation clustering method for delineating the boundaries of ethnic residential clusters. The proposed approach uses a modified greedy algorithm to find the most likely extent of clusters and employs total within-group absolute deviations as a clustering criterion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we applied it to a set of synthetic landscapes and to two empirical data sets in Auckland, New Zealand. The results show that the proposed method can detect ethnic residential clusters effectively and that it has potential for use in other disciplines as it offers an ability to detect large, arbitrarily shaped clusters.     

Network-constrained bivariate clustering method for detecting urban black holes and volcanoes

ABSTRACT

Urban black holes and volcanoes are typical traffic anomalies that are useful for optimizing urban planning and maintaining public safety. It is still challenging to detect arbitrarily shaped urban black holes and volcanoes considering the network constraints with less prior knowledge. This study models urban black holes and volcanoes as bivariate spatial clusters and develops a network-constrained bivariate clustering method for detecting statistically significant urban black holes and volcanoes with irregular shapes. First, an edge-expansion strategy is proposed to construct the network-constrained neighborhoods without the time-consuming calculation of the network distance between each pair of objects. Then, a network-constrained spatial scan statistic is constructed to detect urban black holes and volcanoes, and a multidirectional optimization method is developed to identify arbitrarily shaped urban black holes and volcanoes. Finally, the statistical significance of multiscale urban black holes and volcanoes is evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed method is compared with three state-of-the-art methods using both simulated data and Beijing taxicab spatial trajectory data. The comparison shows that the proposed method can detect urban black holes and volcanoes more accurately and completely and is useful for detecting spatiotemporal variations of traffic anomalies.     

Movement similarity assessment using symbolic representation of trajectories

This article describes a novel approach for finding similar trajectories, using trajectory segmentation based on movement parameters (MPs) such as speed, acceleration, or direction. First, a segmentation technique is applied to decompose trajectories into a set of segments with homogeneous characteristics with respect to a particular MP. Each segment is assigned to a movement parameter class (MPC), representing the behavior of the MP. Accordingly, the segmentation procedure transforms a trajectory to a sequence of class labels, that is, a symbolic representation. A modified version of edit distance called normalized weighted edit distance (NWED) is introduced as a similarity measure between different sequences. As an application, we demonstrate how the method can be employed to cluster trajectories. The performance of the approach is assessed in two case studies using real movement datasets from two different application domains, namely, North Atlantic Hurricane trajectories and GPS tracks of couriers in London. Three different experiments have been conducted that respond to different facets of the proposed techniques and that compare our NWED measure to a related method.     

Coupling fuzzy clustering and cellular automata based on local maxima of development potential to model urban emergence and expansion in economic development zones

ABSTRACT

Modeling urban growth in Economic development zones (EDZs) can help planners determine appropriate land policies for these regions. However, sometimes EDZs are established in remote areas outside of central cities that have no historical urban areas. Existing models are unable to simulate the emergence of urban areas without historical urban land in EDZs. In this study, a cellular automaton (CA) model based on fuzzy clustering is developed to address this issue. This model is implemented by coupling an unsupervised classification method and a modified CA model with an urban emergence mechanism based on local maxima. Through an analysis of the planning policies and existing infrastructure, the proposed model can detect the potential start zones and simulate the trajectory of urban growth independent of the historical urban land use. The method is validated in the urban emergence simulation of the Taiping Bay development zone in Dalian, China from 2013 to 2019. The proposed model is applied to future simulation in 2019–2030. The results demonstrate that the proposed model can be used to predict urban emergence and generate the possible future urban form, which will assist planners in determining the urban layout and controlling urban growth in EDZs.     

Empirical determination of geometric parameters for selective omission in a road network

Selective omission in a road network is a necessary operation for road network generalization. Most existing selective omission approaches involve one or two geometric parameters at a specific scale to determine which roads should be retained or eliminated. This study proposes an approach for determining the empirical threshold for such a parameter. The idea of the proposed approach is to first subdivide a large road network, and then to use appropriate threshold(s) obtained from one or several subdivisions to infer an appropriate threshold for the large one. A series of experiments was carried out to validate the proposed approach. Specifically, the road network data for New Zealand and Hong Kong at different scales (ranging from 1:50,000 to 1:250,000) were used as the experimental data, and subdivided according to different modes (i.e. administrative boundary data, a regular grid of different sizes, different update years, and different road network patterns). Not only geometric parameters, but also structural and hybrid parameters of existing selective omission approaches were involved in the testing. The experimental results show that although the most appropriate thresholds obtained from different subdivisions are not always the same, in most cases, the appropriate threshold ranges often overlap, especially for geometric parameters, and they also overlap with those obtained from the large road network data. This finding is consistent with the use of different subdivision modes, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Several issues involving the use of the proposed approach are also addressed.     

Toward space-time buffering for spatiotemporal proximity analysis of movement data

Spatiotemporal proximity analysis to determine spatiotemporal proximal paths is a critical step for many movement analysis methods. However, few effective methods have been developed in the literature for spatiotemporal proximity analysis of movement data. Therefore, this study proposes a space-time-integrated approach for spatiotemporal proximal analysis considering space and time dimensions simultaneously. The proposed approach is based on space-time buffering, which is a natural extension of conventional spatial buffering operation to space and time dimensions. Given a space-time path and spatial tolerance, space-time buffering constructs a space-time region by continuously generating spatial buffers for any location along the space-time path. The constructed space-time region can delimit all space-time locations whose spatial distances to the target trajectory are less than a given tolerance. Five space-time overlapping operations based on this space-time buffering are proposed to retrieve all spatiotemporal proximal trajectories to the target space-time path, in terms of different spatiotemporal proximity metrics of space-time paths, such as Fréchet distance and longest common subsequence. The proposed approach is extended to analyze space-time paths constrained in road networks. The compressed linear reference technique is adopted to implement the proposed approach for spatiotemporal proximity analysis in large movement datasets. A case study using real-world movement data verifies that the proposed approach can efficiently retrieve spatiotemporal proximal paths constrained in road networks from a large movement database, and has significant computational advantage over conventional space-time separated approaches.     

基于神经网络的单元自动机CA及真实和优化的城市模拟

提出了一种基于神经网络的单元自动机（CA）。CA已被越来越多地应用在城市及其它地理现象的模拟中。CA模拟所碰到的最大问题是如何确定模型的结构和参数。模拟真实的城市涉及到使用许多空间变量和参数。当模型较复杂时，很难确定模型的参数值。本模型的结构较简单，模型的参数能通过对神经网络的训练来自动获取。分析表明，所提出的方法能获得更高的模拟精度，并能大大缩短寻找参数所需要的时间。通过筛选训练数据，本模型还可以进行优化的城市模拟，为城市规划提供参考依据。     

A linear road object matching method for conflation based on optimization and logistic regression

The purpose of object matching in conflation is to identify corresponding objects in different data sets that represent the same real-world entity. This article presents an improved linear object matching approach, named the optimization and iterative logistic regression matching (OILRM) method, which combines the optimization model and logistic regression model to obtain a better matching result by detecting incorrect matches and missed matches that are included in the result obtained from the optimization (Opt) method for object matching in conflation. The implementation of the proposed OILRM method was demonstrated in a comprehensive case study of Shanghai, China. The experimental results showed the following. (1) The Opt method can determine most of the optimal one-to-one matching pairs under the condition of minimizing the total distance of all matching pairs without setting empirical thresholds. However, the matching accuracy and recall need to be further improved. (2) The proposed OILRM method can detect incorrect matches and missed matches and resolve the issues of one-to-many and many-to-many matching relationships with a higher matching recall. (3) In the case where the source data sets become more complicated, the matching accuracy and recall based on the proposed OILRM method are much better than those based on the Opt method.     

Use of Geospatial Data and Technology for Wilderness Search and Rescue by Nonprofit Organizations

Geospatial data and tools are key in locating lost or missing persons in as short a time as possible. In this study, we used a geographic information system (GIS) to analyze four years of search and rescue (SAR) mission data from Colorado to determine the appropriate use of GIS for volunteer-based SAR organizations with limited resources and GIS expertise. GIS can provide more sophisticated analyses of geospatial data than simple mapping technologies, but our findings indicated that complex spatial analysis might not be required on all missions, because the majority of missions were completed within six to ten hours. Instead, new technologies such as tablets with mapping software and online GIS systems that provide quick and easy access to up-to-date geospatial data such as imagery offer capabilities that could improve mission planning. Here we provide a framework in which SAR missions can apply geospatial technologies to aid with missions, identify critical “hotspots,” and enhance postanalysis and training. The work here is highly applicable for nonprofit SAR groups when deciding on what GIS technologies to consider for their areas.     

Exploring spatiotemporal clusters based on extended kernel estimation methods

We examined three different ways to integrate spatial and temporal data in kernel density estimation methods (KDE) to identify space–time clusters of geographic events. Spatial data and time data are typically measured in different units along respective dimensions. Therefore, spatial KDE methods require special extensions when incorporating temporal data to detect spatiotemporal clusters of geographical event. In addition to a real-world data set, we applied the proposed methods to simulated data that were generated through random and normal processes to compare results of different kernel functions. The comparison is based on hit rates and values of a compactness index with considerations of both spatial and temporal attributes of the data. The results show that the spatiotemporal KDE (STKDE) can reach higher hit rates while keeping identified hotspots compact. The implementation of these STKDE methods is tested using the 2012 crime event data in Akron, Ohio, as an example. The results show that STKDE methods reveal new perspectives from the data that go beyond what can be extracted by using the conventional spatial KDE.