Activity-based individual travel regularity exploring with entropy-space K-means clustering using smart card data

Travel activities influence individual travel location, time, and frequencies. Understanding individual travel regularity under different activities is crucial for individual mobility prediction and urban facilities planning. Existing studies need further improvement as they have not adequately taken into account the impact of activity factors on individual travel patterns. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework for exploring travel regularity and the correlation with urban region attributes at the individual level. The framework’s novelty and uniqueness lie in its three layers: (i) A trip pre-processing layer for extracting every complete public transit trip and trip purposes (e.g. commuting activity and non-commuting activity) by combining individual’s travel characteristics and public transport network. (ii) An entropy-based travel regularity measurement and K-means based multiple-view clustering layer to assess the extent of individual travel repetition over time for various travel activity and investigate the similarities and differences among users. (iii) A region dependence correlation analysis layer for exploring the correlation between individual travel regularity and regions attributes of two key locations: home and workplace More importantly, by employing the framework, we gained empirical insights based on a large-scale dataset (covering 0.64 million users) collected from public traffic smart cards. For instance, commuters can be categorized into four groups based on the regularity of their commuting activities: Regular Workers (24%), Flex-time Workers (21%), Overtime Workers (35%), and Other Workers (20%). The distribution of these four groups is associated with workplace’s administrative characteristics, with a Pearson correlation of 0.503. In addition, individuals can also be classified into two groups based on their travel regularity of non-commuting activities: Limited Visitors (37%) and Active Explorers (63%). The distribution of these individuals is correlated with the coverage ratio of public transit facility in their home locations, showing a Pearson correlation of 0.604.