Visual fusion of mega-city big data: An application to traffic and tweets data analysis of Metro passengers

Abstract

Transportation systems in mega-cities are often affected by various kinds of events such as natural disasters, accidents, and public gatherings. Highly dense and complicated networks in the transportation systems propagate confusion in the network because they offer various possible transfer routes to passengers. Visualization is one of the most important techniques for examining such cascades of unusual situations in the huge networks. This paper proposes visual integration of traffic analysis and social media analysis using two forms of big data: smart card data on the Tokyo Metro and social media data on Twitter. Our system provides multiple coordinated views to visually, intuitively, and simultaneously explore changes in passengers' behavior and abnormal situations extracted from smart card data and situational explanations from real voices of passengers such as complaints about services extracted from social media data. We demonstrate the possibilities and usefulness of our novel visualization environment using a series of real data case studies about various kinds of events.