Measuring social functions of city regions from large-scale taxi behaviors

City-scale human mobility analysis is an important problem in pervasive computing. In this paper, with qualitative and quantitative analysis, we establish and confirm the relationship between the get-on/off characteristics of taxi passengers and the social function of city regions. We find that get-on/off amount in a region can depict the social activity dynamics in that area, i.e. the temporal variation of get-on/off amount can characterize the social function of a region. The experimental results on a large-scale real-world taxi dataset suggest that three typical regional categories can be recognized even using a very simple classification method.