As one of the essential indicators for the development of a city, urban vibrancy plays an important role in evaluating the quality of urban areas and guiding urban construction. The development of spatial big data makes it possible to obtain information on user trajectories and the built environment, providing support for the evaluation of urban vibrancy. However, previous studies focused on the number of regional activities when evaluating urban vibrancy and ignored diversity, which was produced by diverse economic landscapes. In this paper, using mobile phone trajectory data, we propose a method for evaluating urban vibrancy from two dimensions: busyness and diversity, based on the improved PageRank algorithm and an index of entropy. Furthermore, in order to explore the relationship between urban vibrancy and the economic landscape, we construct an economic landscape index system based on multi-source data, including points of interest (POIs), roads, building footprints, house prices, the gross domestic product (GDP), and population data. Then, multiple linear regression is utilized to model the relationship between urban vibrancy and the urban economic landscape. The results show that combining busyness and diversity can better characterize urban vibrancy than any single indicator, and the adjusted R-squared (R2) of the regression with economic landscape reaches 0.59.
Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is attracting the increasing attention of researchers because of the rapid development of Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) in recent years. Differing from other recommenders, who only recommend the next POI, this research focuses on the successive POI sequence recommendation. A novel POI sequence recommendation framework, named Dynamic Recommendation of POI Sequence (DRPS), is proposed, which models the POI sequence recommendation as a Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) learning task, that is, the input sequence is a historical trajectory, and the output sequence is exactly the POI sequence to be recommended. To solve this Seq2Seq problem, an effective architecture is designed based on the Deep Neural Network (DNN). Owing to the end-to-end workflow, DRPS can easily make dynamic POI sequence recommendations by allowing the input to change over time. In addition, two new metrics named Aligned Precision (AP) and Order-aware Sequence Precision (OSP) are proposed to evaluate the recommendation accuracy of a POI sequence, which considers not only the POI identity but also the visiting order. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for POI sequence recommendation tasks, and it significantly outperforms the baseline approaches like Additive Markov Chain, LORE and LSTM-Seq2Seq.
Urban catering systems constitute an important subsystem of the complex urban system. They can reveal not only the impact of urban functional structure on the catering but also the behavioral patterns of individual catering points through the exploration of their small-scale aggregation characteristics and influencing elements, thus becoming an essential basis for urban functional planning. In this study, we analyze the aggregation characteristics of catering points in a particular study area using the probabilistic methods, with Beijing catering points as a sample. The analysis revealed a good power-law distribution characteristic of the catering points density at the small scale. Then, an aggregation effect analysis model and an agglomeration effect analysis model were established. Based on this, an empirical analysis of candidate agglomeration kernel elements was conducted. The results showed that the influence of candidate agglomeration kernel elements on catering points exhibited a categorical nature. Additionally, a good power-law attenuation relationship was uncovered between the density and distance of catering points, which ultimately revealed the mechanism of preferential attachment in the competition for catering point site selection. Using the results of the agglomeration analysis, a reasonable explanation was provided for the power-law distribution characteristic of the density of catering points, which achieved an organic connection between micro-analysis and macro-characteristic analysis. These findings could provide a reference for the analysis of aggregation characteristics of other urban commercial formats.