Mobility Tableau: Human Mobility Similarity Measurement for City Dynamics

Abstract

Human mobility similarity comparison plays a critical role in modeling city dynamics, which exerts an enormous impact on developing intelligent transportation system. By expanding origin-destination matrix, we propose a mobility expression named mobility tableau and corresponding similarity measurement approach. Compared with traditional Origin-Destination matrix-based mobility comparison, mobility tableau comparison provides multi-dimensional similarity information, including volume similarity, spatial similarity, mass inclusiveness and structure similarity. The robustness of the measure is supported through several sensitive analysis based on real Global Positioning System dataset. The better performance of our proposed approach compared with traditional methods in two case studies including Call Detail Record based mobility tableau validation and different cities’ mobility comparison also demonstrates the practicality and superiority of our method.