Measuring Urban Vibrancy of Residential Communities Using Big Crowdsourced Geotagged Data

The pervasiveness of mobile and sensing technologies today has facilitated the creation of Big Crowdsourced Geotagged Data (BCGD) from individual users in real time and at different locations in the city. Such ubiquitous user-generated data allow us to infer various patterns of human behavior, which helps us understand the interactions between humans and cities. In this article, we aim to analyze BCGD, including mobile consumption check-ins, urban geography data, and human mobility data, to learn a model that can unveil the impact of urban geography and human mobility on the vibrancy of residential communities. Vibrant communities are defined as places that show diverse and frequent consumer activities. To effectively identify such vibrant communities, we propose a supervised data mining system to learn and mimic the unique spatial configuration patterns and social interaction patterns of vibrant communities using urban geography and human mobility data. Specifically, to prepare the benchmark vibrancy scores of communities for training, we first propose a fused scoring method by fusing the frequency and the diversity of consumer activities using mobile check-in data. Besides, we define and extract the features of spatial configuration and social interaction for each community by mining urban geography and human mobility data. In addition, we strategically combine a pairwise ranking objective with a sparsity regularization to learn a predictor of community vibrancy. And we develop an effective solution for the optimization problem. Finally, our experiment is instantiated on BCGD including real estate, point of interests, taxi and bus GPS trajectories, and mobile check-ins in Beijing. The experimental results demonstrate the competitive performances of both the extracted features and the proposed model. Our results suggest that a structurally diverse community usually shows higher social interaction and better business performance, and incompatible land uses may decrease the vibrancy of a community. Our studies demonstrate the potential of how to best make use of BCGD to create local economic matrices and sustain urban vibrancy in a fast, cheap, and meaningful way.