Latent spatio-temporal activity structures: a new approach to inferring intra-urban functional regions via social media check-in data

AbstractThis article introduces a novel low rank approximation (LRA)-based model to detect the functional regions with the data from about 15 million social media check-in records during a year-long period in Shanghai, China. We identified a series of latent structures, named latent spatio-temporal activity structures. While interpreting these structures, we can obtain a series of underlying associations between the spatial and temporal activity patterns. Moreover, we can not only reproduce the observed data with a lower dimensional representative, but also project spatio-temporal activity patterns in the same coordinate system. With the K-means clustering algorithm, five significant types of clusters that are directly annotated with a combination of temporal activities can be obtained, providing a clear picture of the correlation between the groups of regions and different activities at different times during a day. Besides the commercial and transportation dominant areas, we also detected two kinds of r...