Urban Hotspot Area Detection Using Nearest-Neighborhood-Related Quality Clustering on Taxi Trajectory Data

Urban hotspot area detection is an important issue that needs to be explored for urban planning and traffic management. It is of great significance to mine hotspots from taxi trajectory data, which reflect residents’ travel characteristics and the operational status of urban traffic. The existing clustering methods mainly concentrate on the number of objects contained in an area within a specified size, neglecting the impact of the local density and the tightness between objects. Hence, a novel algorithm is proposed for detecting urban hotspots from taxi trajectory data based on nearest neighborhood-related quality clustering techniques. The proposed spatial clustering algorithm not only considers the maximum clustering in a limited range but also considers the relationship between each cluster center and its nearest neighborhood, effectively addressing the clustering issue of unevenly distributed datasets. As a result, the proposed algorithm obtains high-quality clustering results. The visual representation and simulated experimental results on a real-life cab trajectory dataset show that the proposed algorithm is suitable for inferring urban hotspot areas, and that it obtains better accuracy than traditional density-based methods.