Extracting Human Activity Areas from Large-Scale Spatial Data with Varying Densities

Human activity area extraction, a popular research topic, refers to mining meaningful location clusters from raw activity data. However, varying densities of large-scale spatial data create a challenge for existing extraction methods. This research proposes a novel area extraction framework (ELV) aimed at tackling the challenge by using clustering with an adaptive distance parameter and a re-segmentation strategy with noise recovery. Firstly, a distance parameter was adaptively calculated to cluster high-density points, which can reduce the uncertainty introduced by human subjective factors. Secondly, the remaining points were assigned according to the spatial characteristics of the clustered points for a more reasonable judgment of noise points. Then, to face the varying density problem, a re-segmentation strategy was designed to segment the appropriate clusters into low- and high-density clusters. Lastly, the noise points produced in the re-segmentation step were recovered to reduce unnecessary noise. Compared with other algorithms, ELV showed better performance on real-life datasets and reached 0.42 on the Silhouette coefficient (SC) indicator, with an improvement of more than 16.67%. ELV ensures reliable clustering results, especially when the density differences of the activity points are large, and can be valuable in some applications, such as location prediction and recommendation.

Automated summary

This research proposes a novel area extraction framework (ELV) that tackles the challenge of varying densities of large-scale spatial data by using clustering with an adaptive distance parameter and a re-segmentation strategy with noise recovery. Compared with other algorithms, ELV showed better performance on real-life datasets and achieved a significant improvement in the Silhouette coefficient indicator.