MobInsight: A Framework Using Semantic Neighborhood Features for Localized Interpretations of Urban Mobility

Abstract: Collective urban mobility embodies the residents' local insights on the city. Mobility practices of the residents are produced from their spatial choices, which involve various considerations such as the atmosphere of destinations, distance, past experiences, and preferences. The advances in mobile computing and the rise of geo-social platforms have provided the means for capturing the mobility practices; however, interpreting the residents' insights is challenging due to the scale and complexity of an urban environment, and its unique context. In this paper, we present MobInsight, a framework for making localized interpretations of urban mobility that reflect various aspects of the urbanism. MobInsight extracts a rich set of neighborhood features through holistic semantic aggregation, and models the mobility between all-pairs of neighborhoods. We evaluate MobInsight with the mobility data of Barcelona and demonstrate diverse localized and semantically-rich interpretations.