Exploring Human Mobility Patterns in Urban Scenarios: A Trajectory Data Perspective

Smart cities have been recognized as a promising research focus around the world. To realize smart cities, computation and utilization of big data are key factors. More specifically, exploring the patterns of human mobility based on large amounts of multi-source data plays an important role in analyzing the formation of social-economic phenomena in smart cities. However, our acquired knowledge is still very limited for smart cities. In this article, we propose an integrated computing method to rescale heterogeneous traffic trajectory data, which leverages MLE and BIC. Our analysis is based on two real datasets generated by subway smart card transactions and taxi GPS trajectories from Shanghai, China, which contain more than 451 million trading records by 14 subway lines and 34 billion GPS records by 13,695 taxis. Specifically, we quantitatively explore the patterns of human mobility on weekends and weekdays. Through logarithmic binning and data fitness, we calculate the Bayesian weights to select the best fitting distributions. In addition, we leverage three metrics to analyze the patterns of human mobility in two datasets: trip displacement, trip duration, and trip interval. We obtain several important human mobility patterns and discover quite a few interesting phenomena, which lay a solid foundation for future research.