Place-Centered Bus Accessibility Time Series Classification with Floating Car Data: An Actual Isochrone and Dynamic Time Warping Distance-Based k-Medoids Method

Abstract

Classifying a time series is a fundamental task in temporal analysis. This provides valuable insights into the temporal characteristics of data. Although it has been applied to traffic flow and individual-centered accessibility analysis, it has yet to be applied to place-centered accessibility research. In this study, we have proposed an actual isochrone and dynamic time-wrapping distance-based k-medoids method and tested its applicability to a bus accessibility analysis. Using bus floating car data, our method calculated the actual isochrone area as an accessibility measurement and constructs an accessibility time series for each hexagonal geographical unit within the area of interest. We then calculated the dynamic time warp distance between the accessibility time series of pairwise geographical units and used these distances for k-medoid clustering. The optimized class number k was selected by considering the elbow method, silhouette score, and human examination. Our case study in Hefei, China demonstrates the feasibility of our method for accessibility time series classification. We also discovered that the resulting classes follow clear spatial patterns, indicating that different time series classes may be correlated with their spatial location. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a classification method has been applied to place-centered accessibility time series analysis. Our data-driven method can inform place-centered accessibility in an era in which large quantities of spatiotemporal data like floating car data are available.