A GloVe-Based POI Type Embedding Model for Extracting and Identifying Urban Functional Regions

Points-of-interest (POIs) are an important carriers of location text information in smart cities and have been widely used to extract and identify urban functional regions. However, it is difficult to model the relationship between POIs and urban functional types using existing methods due to insufficient POIs information mining. In this study, we propose a Global Vectors (GloVe)-based, POI type embedding model (GPTEM) to extract and identify urban functional regions at the scale of traffic analysis zones (TAZs) by integrating the co-occurrence information and spatial context of POIs. This method has three main steps. First, we utilize buffer zones centered on each POI to construct the urban functional corpus. Second, we use the constructed corpus and GPTEM to train POI type vectors. Third, we cluster the TAZs and annotate the urban functional types in clustered regions by calculating enrichment factors. The results are evaluated by comparing them against manual annotations and food takeout delivery data, showing that the overall identification accuracy of the proposed method (78.44%) is significantly higher than that of a baseline method based on word2vec. Our work can assist urban planners to efficiently evaluate the development of and changes in the functions of various urban regions.