Mobility Profiling

Abstract

The ability to understand the dynamics of human mobility is crucial for tasks like urban planning and transportation management. The recent rapidly growing availability of large spatio-temporal datasets gives us the possibility to develop sophisticated and accurate analysis methods and algorithms that can enable us to explore several relevant mobility phenomena: the distinct access paths to a territory, the groups of persons that move together in space and time, the regions of a territory that contains a high density of traffic demand, etc. All these paradigmatic perspectives focus on a collective view of the mobility where the interesting phenomenon is the result of the contribution of several moving objects. In this chapter, the authors explore a different approach to the topic and focus on the analysis and understanding of relevant individual mobility habits in order to assign a profile to an individual on the basis of his/her mobility. This process adds a semantic level to the raw mobility data, enabling further analyses that require a deeper understanding of the data itself. The studies described in this chapter are based on two large datasets of spatio-temporal data, originated, respectively, from GPS-equipped devices and from a mobile phone network.