Characterizing regional importance in cities with human mobility motifs in metro networks

Shuyang Shi, Ding Lyu, Lin Wang, Xiaofan Wang and Guanrong Chen

Journal of Transport Geography, 2025, vol. 127, issue C

Abstract: Uncovering higher-order spatiotemporal dependencies within human mobility networks in transportation systems provides crucial insights into urban structure analysis. In most existing studies, human mobility networks are commonly constructed by aggregating all trips without distinguishing who takes which trip. In contrast, we claim that individual mobility motifs – higher-order patterns emerging from individuals' daily trips – serve as fundamental units of human mobility networks. In this study, we propose two network construction frameworks based on mobility motifs to characterize regional importance within cities. First, we consider hidden dependencies within individuals' trips in one day and construct mobility networks based on this mechanism. Second, drawing inspiration from the PageRank algorithm, we hypothesize that individuals assign varying levels of importance to destinations based on their trip intentions. We develop motif-based and motif-wise network construction frameworks. By leveraging large-scale metro data from three cities, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou, we construct three types of human mobility networks and assess regional importance in urban areas through node importance metrics. Comparative results indicate that the motif-based mobility network outperforms traditional mobility networks, underscoring the efficacy of incorporating human mobility motifs. Finally, we demonstrate that our motif-wise framework significantly improves the accuracy of regional importance characterization.

Keywords: Human mobility motif; Human mobility network; Regional importance; Higher-order structure; City structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692325001942

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:127:y:2025:i:c:s0966692325001942

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104303

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Transport Geography is currently edited by Frank Witlox

More articles in Journal of Transport Geography from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().