Exploring Passengers’ Dependency Variety on Stations’ Functions in Urban Subway

Urban subway is taken by people in different frequencies, thus leading them to present different dependency varieties on this mode. Yet, how those passengers who possess low dependency on urban subway travel is less investigated. Under this background, we propose a framework to uncover passengers’ dependency variety on stations’ functions in urban subway. To begin with, nine features regarding travel frequency and time are extracted from 100 million transaction records generated by 11.45 million passengers in a month. Thus, their travel dependency on urban subway is quantified. These features are clustered into 5 distinct levels via the k-means algorithm, before an inference of subway stations’ functions from 236,040 POI data sources via the LDA approach. In this way, passengers’ travel purposes can be identified. How passengers with different dependency levels behave in subway stations in space and time is further explored in a visualization way. The intuitive experimental results, validated by priori user experiences and land-use plan of Beijing, show that among the 5 levels of dependency varieties, passengers in the first two groups present a relatively strong dependency on urban subway. Meanwhile, passengers in the rest three groups possess a low dependency on urban subway and display extreme travel patterns in time and frequency, greatly increasing management difficulties for transit operators. Findings in this research help distinguish passengers with low levels of subway dependency and grasp how those passengers without striking dependency travel by subway and what for so that practitioners can conduct an accurate risk assessment on them.