A Spatio-Temporal Co-Clustering Framework for Discovering Mobility Patterns: A Study of Manhattan Taxi Data

Research on clustering spatio-temporal data to extract mobility patterns requires further development, as most existing studies do not simultaneously integrate data along both spatial dimensions and temporal dimensions but instead focus on only one dimension or separate the dimensions in analyses and applications, which could lead to discoveries that are not representative of the overall data or are dificult to interpret. To simultaneously reveal the spatial and temporal patterns of urban mobility datasets, we propose an analytical framework that is based on co-clustering and enables mobility behaviors to be distinguished in spatial and temporal dimensions. We use one month of taxi GPS data from the Manhattan area to explore spatio-temporal co-occurrence patterns. The spatial and temporal dimensions of taxi trip data were co-clustered by using the Bregman Block Average co-clustering algorithm with I-divergence (BBAC_I). We performed this process on weekdays and holidays and compared the mobility differences between these two periods. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of this analytical framework, with which we can reveal the spatial patterns and their temporal dynamics as well as temporal patterns and their spatial dynamics in mobility data.