Individual movements and geographical data mining. Clustering algorithms for highlighting hotspots in personal navigation routes

Abstract

The rapid developments in the availability and access to spatially referenced information in a variety of areas, has induced the need for better analysis techniques to understand the various phenomena. In particular our analysis represents a first insight into a wealth of geographical data collected by individuals as activity dairy data.The attention is drawn on point datasets corresponding to GPS traces driven along a same route in different days. Our aim here is to explore the presence of clusters along the route, trying to understand the origins and motivations behind that in order to better understand the road network structure in terms of 'dense' spaces along the network. In this paper the attention is therefore focused on methods to highlight such clusters and see their impact on the network structure. Spatial clustering algorithms are examined (DBSCAN) and a comparison with other non-parametric density based algorithm (Kernel Density Estimation) is performed. A test is performed over the urban area of Trieste (Italy). © 2011 Springer-Verlag.