Measuring variability of mobility patterns from multiday smart-card data

Chen Zhong*, Ed Manley, Stefan Mueller Arisona, Michael Batty, Gerhard Schmitt

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

111 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The availability of large amounts of mobility data has stimulated the research in discovering patterns and understanding regularities. Comparatively, less attention has been paid to the study of variability, which, however, has been argued as equally important as regularities, since variability identifies diversity. In a transport network, variability exists from person to person, from place to place, and from day to day. In this paper, we present a set of measuring of variability at individual and aggregated levels using multi-day smart-card data. Statistical analysis, correlation matrix and network-based clustering methods are applied and potential use of measured results for urban applications are also discussed. We take Singapore as a case study and use one-week smart-card data for analysis. An interesting finding is that though the number of trips and mobility patterns varies from day to day, the overall spatial structure of urban movement always remains the same throughout a week. This finding showed that a systemic framework with well-organized analytical methods is indeed, necessary for extracting variability that may change at different levels and consequently for uncovering different aspects of dynamics, namely transit, social and urban dynamics. We consider this paper as a tentative work toward such generic framework for measuring variability and it can be used as a reference for other research work in such a direction.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)125-130
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Computational Science
Volume9
Early online date17 Apr 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jul 2015

Keywords

  • Clustering
  • Network
  • Smart-card data
  • Spatial analysis
  • Variability

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Measuring variability of mobility patterns from multiday smart-card data'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this