Large-scale taxi O/D visual analytics for understanding metropolitan human movement patterns

It is very useful to understand metropolitan human movement patterns for better city planning and traffic management. As the most accessible and wide-coverage data source for probing the laws behind city pulse and human movement, taxi O/D data have been receiving more and more attention from road traffic administration offices. In this paper, we design a visual analysis system for big taxis O/D data for assisting understanding the spatio-temporal patterns of human mobility. The system first helps users determine the regions of interest for further investigation by the global heat map view of O/D distributions; visually encodes the spatio-temporal patterns of the O/D data of the to-be-analyzed regions chosen by lasso or rectangle region selection tools; and provides a multi-dimensidoneonal analysis of the latent spatio-temporal patterns of taxis O/D data through interactions between multiple coordinated views of visualizations including circular pixel graph, spatio-temporal stacked graph and nested pixel bar. The proposed system of taxis O/D data visual analysis gets interesting findings about the metropolitan residents’ movement behavior when applied to large-scale real taxis GPS data in Hangzhou and receives good user feedbacks.