A generic paradigm for mining human mobility patterns based on the GPS trajectory data using complex network analysis

The mining of human mobility can be exploited to support the design of traffic planning, route recommendations, urban planning, emergency management, and land use. Currently, various methods such as the machine learning algorithms, statistical methods, and semantic analysis are widely applied to identify and extract human mobility patterns. In this paper, we propose a simple and generic paradigm for mining human mobility patterns based on the GPS trajectory data using complex network analysis. The essential ideas behind the proposed paradigm mainly include (1) creating weighted complex networks of GPS trajectories and (2) extracting the human mobility patterns by analyzing the structures and metrics of the created complex networks of GPS trajectories. To evaluate the performance of the proposed paradigm, we design five groups of experiments and identify the mobility patterns of the selected five persons based on the selected five network analysis metrics. Experimental results indicate that (1) the proposed paradigm is effective and (2) the quite interesting potential information about the human mobility can be mined easily. The proposed paradigm is simple and generic, which can be employed to rapidly identify the human mobility patterns based on the GPS trajectory data.