Recent years have witnessed the world-wide emergence of mega-metropolises with incredibly huge populations. Understanding residents mobility patterns, or urban dynamics, thus becomes crucial for building modern smart cities. In this paper, we propose a Neighbor-Regularized and context-aware Non-negative Tensor Factorization model (NR-cNTF) to discover interpretable urban dynamics from urban heterogeneous data. Different from many existing studies concerned with prediction tasks via tensor completion, NR-cNTF focuses on gaining urban managerial insights from spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal patterns. This is enabled by high-quality Tucker factorizations regularized by both POI-based urban contexts and geographically neighboring relations. NR-cNTF is also capable of unveiling long-term evolutions of urban dynamics via a pipeline initialization approach. We apply NR-cNTF to a real-life data set containing rich taxi GPS trajectories and POI records of Beijing. The results indicate: 1) NR-cNTF accurately captures four kinds of city rhythms and seventeen spatial communities; 2) the rapid development of Beijing, epitomized by the CBD area, indeed intensifies the job-housing imbalance; 3) the southern areas with recent government investments have shown more healthy development tendency. Finally, NR-cNTF is compared with some baselines on traffic prediction, which further justifies the importance of urban contexts awareness and neighboring regulations.
We analyze the passengers' traffic pattern for 1.58 million taxi trips of Shanghai, China. By employing the non-negative matrix factorization and optimization methods, we find that, people travel on workdays mainly for three purposes: commuting between home and workplace, traveling from workplace to workplace, and others such as leisure activities. Therefore, traffic flow in one area or between any pair of locations can be approximated by a linear combination of three basis flows, corresponding to the three purposes respectively. We name the coefficients in the linear combination as traffic powers, each of which indicates the strength of each basis flow. The traffic powers on different days are typically different even for the same location, due to the uncertainty of the human motion. Therefore, we provide a probability distribution function for the relative deviation of the traffic power. This distribution function is in terms of a series of functions for normalized binomial distributions. It can be well explained by statistical theories and is verified by empirical data. These findings are applicable in predicting the road traffic, tracing the traffic pattern and diagnosing the traffic related abnormal events. These results can also be used to infer land uses of urban area quite parsimoniously. The rapid developments of ubiquitous mobile computing provide planners and researchers with new opportunities to understand and build smart cities by mining the massive spatial-temporal mobility data. However, given the increasing complexity and volume of the emerging mobility datasets, it also becomes challenging to build novel analytical framework that is capable of understanding the structural properties and critical features. In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework to deal with high-dimensional human mobility data. To this end, we formulate mobility data in a probabilistic setting and consider each record a multivariate observation sampled from an underlying distribution. In order to characterize this distribution, we use a multi-way probabilistic factorization model based on the concept of tensor decomposition and probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA). The model provides us with a flexible approach to understand multi-way mobility involving higher-order interactions—which are difficult to characterize with conventional approaches—using simple latent structures. The model can be efficiently estimated using the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. As a numerical example, this model is applied on a four-way dataset recording 14 million public transport journeys extracted from smart card transactions in Singapore. This framework can shed light on the modeling of urban structure by understanding mobility flows in both spatial and temporal dimensions. People flow at a citywide level is in a mixed state with several basic patterns (e.g. commuting, working, commercial), and it is therefore difficult to extract useful information from such a mixture of patterns directly. In this paper, we proposed a novel tensor factorization approach to modeling city dynamics in a basic life pattern space (CitySpectral Space). To obtain the CitySpectrum, we utilized Non-negative Tensor Factorization (NTF) to decompose a people flow tensor into basic life pattern tensors, described by three bases i.e. the intensity variation among different regions, the time-of-day and the sample days. We apply our approach to a big mobile phone GPS log dataset (containing 1.6 million users) to model the fluctuation in people flow before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake from a CitySpectral perspective. In addition, our framework is extensible to a variety of auxiliary spatial-temporal data. We parametrize a people flow with a spatial distribution of the Points of Interest (POIs) to quantitatively analyze the relationship between human mobility and POI distribution. Based on the parametric people flow, we propose a spectral approach for a site-selection recommendation and people flow simulation in another similar area using POI distribution. Abstract Taxicabs play significant roles in public transport systems in large cities. To meet repetitive demands of daily intra-urban travels, cabdrivers acquire self-organized habitual operation behaviors in space and time, largely with assistance of their longitudinal operating experience. Recognizing those collective operation behavior patterns of taxicabs will enable us to better design and implement public transport services and urban development plan. In this paper, we systematically study patterns of the spatial supply of 6000 + taxicabs in Wuhan, China based on a monthly collection of their digital traces and the non-negative matrix factorization method. We successfully identify a set of high-level statistical features of the spatial operation behaviors of taxicabs in Wuhan, providing valuable insights to our knowledge of the demand and supply of taxicabs in (similar) large cities. First, we decouple several spatially cohesive regions with intensive internal taxicab travels (termed as demand regions ), which intuitively reveal the well-known multi-sectored urban configuration of Wuhan. Second, by applying the non-negative matrix factorization to taxicab's longitudinal traces, we uncover remarkably self-organized operation patterns of cabdrivers in space (termed as supply regions ) as reactions to the sectored distribution of daily travel behaviors. We find that a large proportion of cabdrivers frequently operate within single specific service area and a small proportion of taxicabs works as shifting tools between different service areas. Last, we focus on performances of taxicabs with distinct spatial operation behaviors and unveil their statistical characteristics in terms of frequency, duration and distance with passenger on board. Our work demonstrates the great potential to understand and improve urban mobility and public transport system from cabdrivers' collective intelligence. A traffic tensor or simply origin ? destination ? time is a new data model for conventional origin destination (O D) matrices. Tensor models are traffic data analysis techniques which use this new data model to improve performance. Tensors outperform other models because both temporal and spatial fluctuations of traffic patterns are simultaneously taken into account, obtaining results that follow a more natural pattern. Three major types of fluctuations can occur in traffic tensors: mutations to the overall traffic flows, alterations to the network topology and chaotic behaviors. How can we detect events in a system that is faced with all types of fluctuations during its life cycle? Our initial studies reveal that the current design of tensor models face some difficulties in dealing with such a realistic scenario. We propose a new hybrid tensor model called HTM that enhances the detection ability of tensor models by using a parallel tracking technique on the traffic's topology. However, tensor decomposition techniques such as Tucker, a key step for tensor models, require a complicated parameter that not only is difficult to choose but also affects the model's quality. We address this problem examining a recent technique called adjustable core size Tucker decomposition (ACS-Tucker). Experiments on simulated and real-world data sets from different domains versus several techniques indicate that the proposed model is effective and robust, therefore it constitutes a viable alternative for analysis of the traffic tensors. HighlightsA new problem in tensor-based traffic models is introduced and formulated.Separation of topology makes tensor models more sensitive to topological changes.Our hybrid tensor model has 10 better detection power than naive tensor models.Tensor-based models are more robust than matrix residual methods such as DTA.Adjustable core size Tucker decomposition is a potential method for tensor models.  Urbanization's rapid progress has modernized many people's lives but also engendered big issues, such as traffic congestion, energy consumption, and pollution. Urban computing aims to tackle these issues by using the data that has been generated in cities (e.g., traffic flow, human mobility, and geographical data). Urban computing connects urban sensing, data management, data analytics, and service providing into a recurrent process for an unobtrusive and continuous improvement of people's lives, city operation systems, and the environment. Urban computing is an interdisciplinary field where computer sciences meet conventional city-related fields, like transportation, civil engineering, environment, economy, ecology, and sociology in the context of urban spaces. This article first introduces the concept of urban computing, discussing its general framework and key challenges from the perspective of computer sciences. Second, we classify the applications of urban computing into seven categories, consisting of urban planning, transportation, the environment, energy, social, economy, and public safety and security, presenting representative scenarios in each category. Third, we summarize the typical technologies that are needed in urban computing into four folds, which are about urban sensing, urban data management, knowledge fusion across heterogeneous data, and urban data visualization. Finally, we give an outlook on the future of urban computing, suggesting a few research topics that are somehow missing in the community.