Exploring the tidal effect of urban business district with large-scale human mobility data

摘要

Business districts are urban areas that have various functions for gathering people, such as work, consumption, leisure and entertainment. Due to the dynamic nature of business activities, there exists significant tidal effect on the boundary and functionality of business districts. Indeed, effectively analyzing the tidal patterns of business districts can benefit the economic and social development of a city. However, with the implicit and complex nature of business district evolution, it is non-trivial for existing works to support the fine-grained and timely analysis on the tidal effect of business districts. To this end, we propose a data-driven and multi-dimensional framework for dynamic business district analysis. Specifically, we use the large-scale human trajectory data in urban areas to dynamically detect and forecast the boundary changes of business districts in different time periods. Then, we detect and forecast the functional changes in business districts. Experimental results on real-world trajectory data clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on detecting and predicting the boundary and functionality change of business districts. Moreover, the analysis on practical business districts shows that our method can discover meaningful patterns and provide interesting insights into the dynamics of business districts. For example, the major functions of business districts will significantly change in different time periods in a day and the rate and magnitude of boundaries varies with the functional distribution of business districts.