Location Analytics of Routine Occurrences (LARO) to Identify Locations with Regularly Occurring Events with a Case Study on Traffic Accidents.

Conventional spatiotemporal methods take frequentist or density-based approaches to map event clusters over time. While these methods discern hotspots of varying continuity in space and time, their findings overlook locations of routine occurrences where the geographic context may contribute to the regularity of event occurrences. Hence, this research aims to recognize the routine occurrences of point events and relate site characteristics and situation dynamics around these locations to explain the regular occurrences. We developed an algorithm, Location Analytics of Routine Occurrences (LARO), to determine an appropriate temporal unit based on event periodicity, seek locations of routine occurrences, and geographically contextualize these locations through spatial association mining. We demonstrated LARO in a case study with over 250,000 reported traffic accidents from 2010 to 2018 in Dallas, Texas, United States. LARO identified three distinctive locations, each exhibiting varying frequencies of traffic accidents at each weekly hour. The findings indicated that locations with routine traffic accidents are surrounded by high densities of stores, restaurants, entertainment, and businesses. The timing of traffic accidents showed a strong relationship with human activities around these points of interest. Besides the LARO algorithm, this study contributes to the understanding of previously overlooked periodicity in traffic accidents, emphasizing the association between periodic human activities and the occurrence of street-level traffic accidents. The proposed LARO algorithm is applicable to occurrences of point-based events, such as crime incidents or animal sightings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]