Methods for deriving and calibrating privacy-preserving heat maps from mobile sports tracking application data

Juha Oksanen, Cecilia Bergman, Jani Sainio and Jan Westerholm

Journal of Transport Geography, 2015, vol. 48, issue C, 135-144

Abstract: Utilization of movement data from mobile sports tracking applications is affected by its inherent biases and sensitivity, which need to be understood when developing value-added services for, e.g., application users and city planners. We have developed a method for generating a privacy-preserving heat map with user diversity (ppDIV), in which the density of trajectories, as well as the diversity of users, is taken into account, thus preventing the bias effects caused by participation inequality. The method is applied to public cycling workouts and compared with privacy-preserving kernel density estimation (ppKDE) focusing only on the density of the recorded trajectories and privacy-preserving user count calculation (ppUCC), which is similar to the quadrat-count of individual application users. An awareness of privacy was introduced to all methods as a data pre-processing step following the principle of k-Anonymity. Calibration results for our heat maps using bicycle counting data gathered by the city of Helsinki are good (R2>0.7) and raise high expectations for utilizing heat maps in a city planning context. This is further supported by the diurnal distribution of the workouts indicating that, in addition to sports-oriented cyclists, many utilitarian cyclists are tracking their commutes. However, sports tracking data can only enrich official in-situ counts with its high spatio-temporal resolution and coverage, not replace them.

Keywords: Cycling; Location-based services (LBSs); Urban planning; Privacy; Big data; GIS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692315001647

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:48:y:2015:i:c:p:135-144

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2015.09.001

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 ().