Urban Area Characterization and Structure Analysis: A Combined Data-Driven Approach by Remote Sensing Information and Spatial–Temporal Wireless Data

Analysis of urban area function is crucial for urban development. Urban area function features can help to conduct better urban planning and transportation planning. With development of urbanization, urban area function becomes complex. In order to accurately extract function features, researchers have proposed multisource data mining methods that combine urban remote sensing and other data. Therefore, the research of efficient multisource data analysis tools has become a new hot topic. In this paper, a novel urban data analysis method combining spatiotemporal wireless network data and remote sensing data was proposed. First, a Voronoi-diagram-based method was used to divide the urban remote sensing images into zones. Second, we combined period and trend components of wireless network traffic data to mine urban function structure. Third, for multisource supported urban simulation, we designed a novel spatiotemporal city computing method combining graph attention network (GAT) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) to analyze spatiotemporal urban data. The final results prove that our method performs better than other commonly used methods. In addition, we calculated the commuting index of each zone by wireless network data. Combined with the urban simulation conducted in this paper, the dynamic changes of urban area features can be sensed in advance for a better sustainable urban development.