Visual exploration of urban functional zones based on augmented nonnegative tensor factorization

A city contains a variety of different urban functions with referring to the purpose of land use to support the diverse needs of urban residents, such as residence, working and recreation. Exploring urban functional zones is a critical task, which provides valuable applications for business site selection, transportation management and urban planning. It is well known that location information and human mobility semantics both are significant factors for identifying urban functional zones, just considering one factor is not effective. However, most of existing techniques capture the transformation of functional zones and interpret the results based solely on location or mobility semantics, and lack the capacity to deal with the multifaceted features of urban data. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose an interactive visual analytics system for effectively exploring urban functional zones based on spatio-temporal OD data and Points of Interest data. We first adaptively partition the territory into region units based on adaptive blue noise sampling method, extract POI feature matrix (location information) as a prior knowledge, model multidimensional spatio-temporal OD data as a tensor for addressing multifaceted features and propose an augment tensor-based algorithm that enables users to simultaneously combine mobility semantics and inherent location information for identifying functional zones. In addition, we design a set of visual encodings to better understand and interpret the results in a visual and intuitive manner. This system has been demonstrated using two case studies with a real-world dataset of HangZhou city and domain-expert interviews. Graphic Abstract