In this study we estimate urban traffic flow using GPS-enabled taxi trajectory data in Qingdao, China, and examine the capability of the betweenness centrality of the street network to predict traffic flow. The results show that betweenness centrality is not a good predictor variable for urban traffic flow, which has, theoretically, been pointed out in existing literature. With a critique of the betweenness centrality as a predictor, we further analyze the characteristics of betweenness centrality and point out the ‘gap’ between this centrality measure and actual flow. Rather than considering only the topological properties of a street network, we take into account two aspects, the spatial heterogeneity of human activities and the distance-decay law, to explain the observed traffic-flow distribution. The spatial distribution of human activities is estimated using mobile phone Erlang values, and the power law distance decay is adopted. We run Monte Carlo simulations to generate trips and predict traffic-flow distributions, and use a weighted correlation coefficient to measure the goodness of fit between the observed and the simulated data. The correlation coefficient achieves the maximum (0.623) when the exponent equals 2.0, indicating that the proposed model, which incorporates geographical constraints and human mobility patterns, can interpret urban traffic flow well.

Due to the limitation of data collection techniques and privacy issues, the problem of missing spatial origin-destination flows frequently occurs. Data imputation provides great support for the acquisition of complete flow data, which enables us to better understand regional connections and mobility patterns. However, existing models or approaches neglect the network structure of spatial flows, thus resulting in inappropriate estimates and a low performance. The development of graph neural networks offers a powerful tool to deal with graph-structured data. In this article, we proposed a spatial interaction graph convolutional network model, which combines graph convolution and a mapping function to predict flow data from the perspective of network learning. This model utilizes geographical unit embedding in local spatial networks to improve prediction accuracy. A negative sampling technique is adopted to reduce misestimation. Experiments on Beijing taxi trip data verified the usefulness of our model in spatial flow prediction. We also demonstrated that a biased training sample had a negative impact on the model’s performance. More attributes of geographical units, a more proper negative sampling rate and a larger training set can increase the prediction accuracy of flow data.

The efficiency of taxi services in big cities influences not only the convenience of peoples’ travel but also urban traffic and profits for taxi drivers. To balance the demands and supplies of taxicabs, spatio-temporal knowledge mined from historical trajectories is recommended for both passengers finding an available taxicab and cabdrivers estimating the location of the next passenger. However, taxi trajectories are long sequences where single-step optimization cannot guarantee the global optimum. Taking long-term revenue as the goal, a novel method is proposed based on reinforcement learning to optimize taxi driving strategies for global profit maximization. This optimization problem is formulated as a Markov decision process for the whole taxi driving sequence. The state set in this model is defined as the taxi location and operation status. The action set includes the operation choices of empty driving, carrying passengers or waiting, and the subsequent driving behaviors. The reward, as the objective function for evaluating driving policies, is defined as the effective driving ratio that measures the total profit of a cabdriver in a working day. The optimal choice for cabdrivers at any location is learned by the Q-learning algorithm with maximum cumulative rewards. Utilizing historical trajectory data in Beijing, the experiments were conducted to test the accuracy and efficiency of the method. The results show that the method improves profits and efficiency for cabdrivers and increases the opportunities for passengers to find taxis as well. By replacing the reward function with other criteria, the method can also be used to discover and investigate novel spatial patterns. This new model is prior knowledge-free and globally optimal, which has advantages over previous methods.

Recognizing urban functions is crucial for understanding urban spatial structures and urban planning. Previous work has investigated urban functions based on human activities that were derived from mobile phone positioning data, check-in data, taxi data, etc. However, urban functions can only be comprehensively sensed from both human activities and the physical environment together. To do so, a deep learning method was proposed to predict urban functions by integrating social media data and street-level imagery. The verbs extracted from social media posts were taken as the proxy for human activities, and we identified urban physical environmental information from street-level imagery. Then urban functions were uncovered from both the verbs in terms of human activities and street-level imagery from the perspective of the physical environment. Twelve types of urban function were recognized by verbs in social media posts, which were then improved by integrating street-level imagery within the 5th Ring Road of Beijing, China. The experiment demonstrated that verbs as direct proxies for human activities can avoid noise, and the multi-source data integration eliminated biases caused by a single data source. This work provides a comprehensive understanding of urban structure and dynamics for urban management and planning.

Massive spatio-temporal big data about human mobility have become increasingly available. Revealing underlying dynamic patterns from these data is essential for understanding people’s behavior and urban deployment. Spatio-temporal autocorrelation analysis is an exploratory approach to recognizing data distribution in space and time. The most widely used spatial autocorrelation measurements, such as Moran’s I and local indicators of spatial association (LISA), only apply to static data, so are powerless to spatio-temporal big data about human mobility. Thus, we proposed a new method by extending Moran’s I to measure the spatial autocorrelation of time series data. Then the method was applied to taxi ride data in Beijing, China to reveal the spatial pattern of collective human mobility. The result shows that there is strong positive spatio-temporal autocorrelation within the 5th Ring Road, weak negative spatio-temporal autocorrelation nearby the Sixth Ring Road, and almost no spatio-temporal autocorrelation between the roads. Local spatial patterns of taxi travel were also recognized. This method is useful for discovering underlying patterns from spatio-temporal big data to understand human mobility.