A visual and computational analysis approach for exploring significant locations and time periods along a bus route

Understanding human mobility is important for planning and delivering various services in urban area. An important element for mobility understanding is to understand the context in which the movement takes place. In this direction, we propose a method for identifying significant locations and time periods along a bus route. The significance is based on special characteristics that locations have during specific time periods as determined from the effect of these locations on the movement of the bus. The method extracts discriminative features from the space, time and other selected attributes and then classifies locations and time periods into five significance classes. The classes are then rendered in different views for discovering and understanding patterns. The novelty of the method is an explicit consideration of the time dimension at different granularity levels and a visualization that facilitates comparison across the space and time dimensions while avoiding a visual clutter. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by applying it on a large set of bus trajectories.