Fusing GPS probe and mobile phone data for enhanced land-use detection

Profiling the diversity of land use in modern cities by mining data related to human mobility represents a challenging problem in urban planning, transportation and smart city management. Previous work on mobile phone data (i.e., Call Detail Records) has shown the existence of strong correlations between the urban tissue and the associated mobile communication demand. Similarly, GPS traces of vehicles convey information on transportation demand and human activities that can be related to the land use of the neighborhood where they take place. In this paper, we investigate the land use patterns that emerge when studying simultaneously GPS traces of probe vehicles and mobile phone data collected by network providers. To this end, we extend previous definitions of mobile phone traffic signatures for land use detection, so as to incorporate additional information on human presence and mobility conveyed by GPS traces of vehicles. Leveraging these extended signatures, we exploit an unsupervised learning technique to identify classes of signatures that are distinctive of different land use. We apply our technique to real-world data collected in French and Italian cities. Results unveil the existence of signatures that are common to all studied areas and specific to particular land uses. The combined use of mobile phone data and GPS traces outperforms previous approaches when confronted to ground-truth information, and allows characterizing land use in greater detail than in the literature to date.