Search

The rapidly developing economy and growing urbanization in China have created the largest rural-to-urban migration in human history. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of the pattern of rural flight and its prevalence and magnitude over the country is increasingly important for sociological and political concerns. Because of the limited availability of internal migration data, which was derived previously from the decennial population census and small-scale household survey, we could not obtain timely and consistent observations for rural depopulation dynamics across the whole country. In this study, we use aggregate location-aware data collected from mobile location requests in the largest Chinese social media platform during the period of the 2016 Chinese New Year to conduct a nationwide estimate of rural depopulation in China (in terms of the grid cell-level prevalence and the magnitude) based on the world's largest travel period. Our results suggest a widespread rural flight likely occurring in 60.2% (36.5%-81.0%, lower-upper estimate) of rural lands at the grid cell-level and covering ~1.55 (1.48-1.94) million villages and hamlets, most of China's rural settlement sites. Moreover, we find clear regional variations in the magnitude and spatial extent of the estimated rural depopulation. These variations are likely connected to regional differences in the size of the source population, largely because of the nationwide prevalence of rural flight in today's China. Our estimate can provide insights into related investigations of China's rural depopulation and the potential of increasingly available crowd-sourced data for demographic studies.

Visual landmarks are important navigational aids for research into and design of applications for last mile pedestrian navigation, e.g., business card route of pedestrian navigation. The business card route is a route between a fixed origin (e.g., campus entrance) to a fixed destination (e.g., office). The changing characteristics and combinations of various sensors’ data in smartphones or navigation devices can be viewed as invisible salient landmarks for business card route of pedestrian navigation. However, the advantages of these invisible landmarks have not been fully utilized, despite the prevalence of GPS and digital maps. This paper presents an improvement to the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence to find invisible landmarks along predesigned pedestrian routes, which can guide pedestrians by locating them without using digital maps. This approach is suitable for use as a “business card” route for newcomers to find their last mile destinations smoothly by following precollected sensor data along a target route. Experiments in real pedestrian navigation environments show that our proposed approach can sense the location of pedestrians automatically, both indoors and outdoors, and has smaller positioning errors than purely GPS and Wi-Fi positioning approaches in the study area. Consequently, the proposed methodology is appropriate to guide pedestrians to unfamiliar destinations, such as a room in a building or an exit from a park, with little dependency on geographical information.

Previous research on the geographies of food put a considerable focus on analyzing how different types of food or ingredients are consumed across different places. Little is known, however, about how food culture is manifested through various cooking traditions as well as people’s perceptions over different culinary styles. Using a data set captured from one of the largest online review sites in China (www.dianping.com), this study demonstrates how geo-referenced social review data can be leveraged to better understand the geographic prevalence and mix of regional cuisines in Chinese cities. Based on information of millions of restaurants obtained in selected cities (i.e., provincial capitals and municipalities under direct supervision of the Chinese central government), we first measure by each city the diversity of restaurants that serve regional Chinese cuisines using the Shannon entropy, and analyze how cities with different characteristics are geographically distributed. A hierarchical clustering algorithm is then used to further explore the similarities of consumers’ dining options among these cities. By associating each regional Chinese cuisine to its origin, we then develop a weighted distance measure to quantify the geographic prevalence of each cuisine type. Finally, a popularity index (POPU) is introduced to quantify consumers’ preferences for different regional cuisines. We find that: (1) diversity of restaurants among the cities shows an “east–west” contrast that is in general agreement with the socioeconomic divide in China; (2) most of the cities have their own unique characteristics, which are mainly driven by a large market share of the corresponding local cuisine; (3) there exists great heterogeneity of the geographic prevalence of different Chinese cuisines. In particular, Chuan and Xiang, which are famous for their spicy taste, are widely distributed across the mainland China and (4) among the top-tier restaurants ranked by the consumers in a city, the local cuisine is not usually favored, while other cuisines are favored by consumers in many different cities. This study demonstrates the use of social review data as a cost-effective approach of studying urban gastronomy and its relationship with human activities.

Mobile phone location data is a newly emerging data source of great potential to support human mobility research. However, recent studies have indicated that many users can be easily re-identified based on their unique activity patterns. Privacy protection procedures will usually change the original data and cause a loss of data utility for analysis purposes. Therefore, the need for detailed data for activity analysis while avoiding potential privacy risks presents a challenge. The aim of this study is to reveal the re-identification risks from a Chinese city's mobile users and to examine the quantitative relationship between re-identification risk and data utility for an aggregated mobility analysis. The first step is to apply two reported attack models, the top N locations and the spatio-temporal points, to evaluate the re-identification risks in Shenzhen City, a metropolis in China. A spatial generalization approach to protecting privacy is then proposed and implemented, and spatially aggregated analysis is used to assess the loss of data utility after privacy protection. The results demonstrate that the re-identification risks in Shenzhen City are clearly different from those in regions reported in Western countries, which prove the spatial heterogeneity of re-identification risks in mobile phone location data. A uniform mathematical relationship has also been found between re-identification risk (x) and data (y) utility for both attack models: y = -axb+c, (a, b, c>0; 0

The advent of big data has aided understanding of the driving forces of human mobility, which is beneficial for many fields, such as mobility prediction, urban planning, and traffic management. However, the data sources used in many studies, such as mobile phone location and geo-tagged social media data, are sparsely sampled in the temporal scale. An individual’s records can be distributed over a few hours a day, or a week, or over just a few hours a month. Thus, the representativeness of sparse mobile phone location data in characterizing human mobility requires analysis before using data to derive human mobility patterns. This paper investigates this important issue through an approach that uses subscriber mobile phone location data collected by a major carrier in Shenzhen, China. A dataset of over 5 million mobile phone subscribers that covers 24 h a day is used as a benchmark to test the representativeness of mobile phone location data on human mobility indicators, such as total travel distance, movement entropy, and radius of gyration. This study divides this dataset by hour, using 2- to 23-h segments to evaluate the representativeness due to the availability of mobile phone location data. The results show that different numbers of hourly segments affect estimations of human mobility indicators and can cause overestimations or underestimations from the individual perspective. On average, the total travel distance and movement entropy tend to be underestimated. The underestimation coefficient results for estimation of total travel distance are approximately linear, declining as the number of time segments increases, and the underestimation coefficient results for estimating movement entropy decline logarithmically as the time segments increase, whereas the radius of gyration tends to be more ambiguous due to the loss of isolated locations. This paper suggests that researchers should carefully interpret results derived from this type of sparse data in the era of big data.

Investigating human mobility patterns can help researchers and agencies understand the driving forces of human movement, with potential benefits for urban planning and traffic management. Recent advances in location-aware technologies have provided many new data sources (e.g., mobile phone and social media data) for studying human space-time behavioral regularity. Although existing studies have utilized these new datasets to characterize human mobility patterns from various aspects, such as predicting human mobility and monitoring urban dynamics, few studies have focused on human convergence and divergence patterns within a city. This study aims to explore human spatial convergence and divergence and their evolutions over time using large-scale mobile phone location data. Using a dataset from Shenzhen, China, we developed a method to identify spatiotemporal patterns of human convergence and divergence. Eight distinct patterns were extracted, and the spatial distributions of these patterns are discussed in the context of urban functional regions. Thus, this study investigates urban human convergence and divergence patterns and their relationships with the urban functional environment, which is helpful for urban policy development, urban planning and traffic management.