Mining the Semantics of Origin-Destination Flows using Taxi Traces

Origin-destination(OD) flows reflect both human activity and urban dynamic in a city. However, our understanding about their patterns remains limited. In this paper, we study the GPS traces of taxis in a city with several millions people, China and find that there are significant patterns under the OD flows constructed from taxis' random motion. Our spatiotemporal analysis shows that those patterns have close relationship with the semantics of OD flows, hence we can mine the semantics of OD flows from raw GPS trace data. The approach we proposed offers a novel way to explore the human mobility and location characteristic.