Building-Level Urban Functional Area Identification Based on Multi-Attribute Aggregated Data from Cell Phones—A Method Combining Multidimensional Time Series with a SOM Neural Network

Abstract

Portraying functional urban areas provides useful insights for understanding complex urban systems and formulating rational urban plans. Mobile phone user trajectory data are often used to infer the individual activity patterns of people and for functional area identification, but they are difficult to obtain because of personal privacy issues and have the drawback of a sparse spatial and temporal distribution. Deep learning models have been widely utilized in functional area recognition but are limited by the difficulty of acquiring training samples with large data volumes. This paper aims to achieve a fast and automatic identification of large-scale urban functional areas without prior knowledge. This paper uses Nanjing city as a test area, and a self-organizing map (SOM) neural network model based on an improved dynamic time warping (Ndim-DTW) distance is used to automatically identify the function of each building using mobile phone aggregated data containing work and residence attributes. The results show that the recognition accuracy reaches 88.7%, which is 12.4% higher than that of the K-medoids method based on the DTW distance using a single attribute and 7.8% higher than that of the K-medoids method based on the Ndim-DTW distance with multiple attributes, confirming the effectiveness of the multi-attribute mobile phone aggregated data and the SOM model based on the Ndim-DTW distance. Furthermore, at the traffic analysis zone (TAZ) level, this paper detects that Nanjing has seven functional area hotspots with a high degree of mixing. The results can provide a data basis for urban studies on, for example, the urban spatial structure, the separation of occupations and residences, and environmental suitability evaluation.