Ranking Spatial Units with Structural Property and Traffic Distributions for Uncovering Spatial Interaction Patterns in a City

Travel activity data mining is critical to numerous urban applications such as transportation and location‐based services. This article studies the spatial units ranking algorithm for uncovering spatial interaction patterns based on the flow properties of people's travel trajectories. For example, using a taxi origin–destination flow database, a user may want to rank the origin and destination with respect to their functional importance within the urban activity space. In the literature, such an importance concept is usually specified via the frequency function of trip flows. Considering the case that the less frequently visited place in reality may still be an important origin or an important destination, we propose a different method for the ranking of spatial units by introducing the structural property of trip network. The proposed method is inspired from the mutual reinforcing relationship between the trip origins and destinations: important destinations attract travel flows from important origins and at the same time important origins have many flows toward important destinations. Our experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in uncovering spatial interaction patterns of urban activities.