Urban spatial-temporal activity structures: a New Approach to Inferring the Intra-urban Functional Regions via Social Media Check-In Data

Most existing literature focuses on the exterior temporal rhythm of human movement to infer the functional regions in a city, but they neglects the underlying interdependence between the functional regions and human activities which uncovers more detailed characteristics of regions. In this research, we proposed a novel model based on the low rank approximation (LRA) to detect the functional regions using the data from about 15 million check-in records during a yearlong period in Shanghai, China. We find a series of latent structures, called urban spatial-temporal activity structure (USTAS). While interpreting these structures, a series of outstanding underlying associations between the spatial and temporal activity patterns can be found. Moreover, we can not only reproduce the observed data with a lower dimensional representative but also simultaneously project both the spatial and temporal activity patterns in the same coordinate system. By utilizing the K-means clustering algorithm, five significant types of clusters which are directly annotated with a corresponding combination of temporal activities can be obtained. This provides a clear picture of how the groups of regions are associated with different activities at different time of day. Besides the commercial and transportation dominant area, we also detect two kinds of residential areas, the developed residential areas and the developing residential areas. We further verify the spatial distribution of these clusters in the view of urban form analysis. The results shows a high consistency with the government planning from the same periods, indicating our model is applicable for inferring the functional regions via social media check-in data, and can benefit a wide range of fields, such as urban planning, public services and location-based recommender systems and other purposes.