Discovering Urban Functions of High-Definition Zoning with Continuous Human Traces

Identifying the dynamic functions of different urban zones enables a variety of smart city applications, such as intelligent urban planning, real-time traffic scheduling, and community precision management. Traditional urban function research using government administrative zoning systems is often conducted in a coarse resolution with fixed split, and ignore the reshaping of zones by city growth. To solve this problem, we propose a two-stage framework in order to represent the high-definition distribution of urban function across the city, by analyzing continuous human traces extracted from the dense, widespread, and full-time cellular data. At the representation stage, we embed the locations of base stations by modeling the user movements with staying and transfer events, along with the consideration of dynamic trip purposes in continuous human traces. At the annotation stage, we first divide the city into the finest unit zones and each covers at least one base station. By clustering the base stations, we further group the unit zones into functional zones. Last, we annotate functional zones based on the local point-of-interest (POI) information. In experiments, we evaluate the proposed high-definition function study in two tasks: (i) in-zone crowd flow prediction, and (ii) zone-enhanced POI recommendation. The results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method with both the effectiveness of city split and the high-quality function annotation.