Ranking places in attributed temporal urban mobility networks

PLoS One. 2020 Oct 14;15(10):e0239319. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239319. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Drawing on the recent advances in complex network theory, urban mobility flow patterns, typically encoded as origin-destination (OD) matrices, can be represented as weighted directed graphs, with nodes denoting city locations and weighted edges the number of trips between them. Such a graph can further be augmented by node attributes denoting the various socio-economic characteristics at a particular location in the city. In this paper, we study the spatio-temporal characteristics of "hotspots" of different types of socio-economic activities as characterized by recently developed attribute-augmented network centrality measures within the urban OD network. The workflow of the proposed paper comprises the construction of temporal OD networks using two custom data sets on urban mobility in Rome and London, the addition of socio-economic activity attributes to the OD network nodes, the computation of network centrality measures, the identification of "hotspots" and, finally, the visualization and analysis of measures of their spatio-temporal heterogeneity. Our results show structural similarities and distinctions between the spatial patterns of different types of human activity in the two cities. Our approach produces simple indicators thus opening up opportunities for practitioners to develop tools for real-time monitoring and visualization of interactions between mobility and economic activity in cities.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Humans
  • London
  • Movement*
  • Rome
  • Spatio-Temporal Analysis

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.12720767.v1

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the Spanish Government, Ministerio de Economía y Competividad, grant number TIN2017-84821-P. It is also funded by the EU H2020 programme under Grant Agreement No. 780754, “Track & Know”.