Characterization of individual mobility for non-routine scenarios from Crowd Sensing and Clustered Data

Abstract

Demand for leisure activities has increased due to some reasons such as increasing wealth, ageing populations and changing lifestyles, however, the efficiency of public transport system relies on solid demand levels and well-established mobility patterns and, so, providing quality public transportation is extremely expensive in low, variable and unpredictable demand scenarios, as it is the case of out-of-routine trips. Better prediction estimations about the trip purpose helps to anticipate the transport demand and consequently improve its planning. This paper addresses the contribution in comparing the traditional approach of considering municipality division to study such trips against a proposed approach based on clustering of dense concentration of services in the urban space. In our case, POIs (Points of Interest) collected from social networks (e.g. Foursquare) represent these services. These trips were associated with the territory using two different approaches: ‘municipalities’ and ‘clusters’ and then related with the likelihood of choosing a POI category (Points-of-Interest). The results obtained for both geographical approaches are then compared considering a multinomial model to check for differences in destination choice. The variables of distance travelled, travel time and whether the trip was made on a weekday or a weekend had a significant contribution in the choice of destination using municipalities approach. Using clusters approach, the results are similar but the accuracy is improved and due to more significant results to more categories of destinations, more conclusions can be drawn. These results lead us to believe that a cluster-based analysis using georeferenced data from social media can contribute significantly better than a territorial-based analysis to the study of out-of-routine mobility. We also contribute to the knowledge of patterns of this type of travel, a type of trips that is still poorly valued and difficult to study. Nevertheless, it would be worth a more extensive analysis, such as analysing more variables or even during a larger period.