SNN_flow: a shared nearest-neighbor-based clustering method for inhomogeneous origin-destination flows

Abstract

Identifying clusters from individual origin–destination (OD) flows is vital for investigating spatial interactions and flow mapping. However, detecting arbitrarily-shaped and non-uniform flow clusters from network-constrained OD flows continues to be a challenge. This study proposes a shared nearest-neighbor-based clustering method (SNN_flow) for inhomogeneous OD flows constrained by a road network. To reveal clusters of varying shapes and densities, a normalized density for each OD flow is defined based on the concept of shared nearest-neighbor, and flow clusters are constructed using the density-connectivity mechanism. To handle large amounts of disaggregated OD flows, an efficient method for searching the network-constrained k-nearest flows is developed based on a local road node distance matrix. The parameters of SNN_flow are statistically determined: the density threshold is modeled as a significance level of a significance test, and the number of nearest neighbors is estimated based on the variance of the kth nearest distance. SNN_flow is compared with three state-of-the-art methods using taxicab trip data in Beijing. The results show that SNN_flow outperforms existing methods in identifying flow clusters with irregular shapes and inhomogeneous distributions. The clusters identified by SNN_flow can reveal human mobility patterns in Beijing.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.