Public Transportation Mode Detection from Cellular Data

Abstract

Public transportation is essential in people's daily life and it is crucial to understand how people move around the city. Some prior works have exploited GPS, Wi-Fi or bluetooth to collect data, in which extra sensors or devices were needed. Other works utilized data from smart card systems. However, some public transportation systems have their own smart card system and the smart card data cannot include all kinds of transportation modes, which makes it unsuitable for our study.Nowadays, each user has his/her own mobile phones and from the cellular data of mobile phone service providers, it is possible to know the uses' transportation mode and the fine-grained crowd flows. As such, given a set of cellular data, we propose a system for public transportation mode detection, crowd density estimation, and crowd flow estimation. Note that we only have cellular data, no extra sensor data collected from users' mobile phones. In this paper, we refer to some external data sources (e.g., the bus routing networks) to identify transportation modes. Users' cellular data sometimes have uncertainty about user location information. Thus, we propose two approaches for different transportation mode detection considering the cell tower properties, spatial and temporal factors. We demonstrate our system using the data from Chunghwa Telecom, which is the largest telecommunication company in Taiwan, to show the usefulness of our system.