Comparing the Origin-Destination Matrices from Travel Demand Model and Social Media Data

In this paper the authors use Twitter data and a recently developed algorithm at the University of California Santa Barbara to extract Origin-Destination pairs in the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area known as the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) region. This algorithm contains two steps: individual-based trajectory detection and place-based trip aggregation. In essence, if a person tweeted in different TAZs within 4 hours, it is considered to be one OD-trip. The extracted OD-trips were aggregated into 30 minute intervals. Then, the authors compare these trips with a traditional travel demand model (SCAG, 2012, 4-step model). Substantial spatial heterogeneity is found and a variety of social factors including the tweeting demographics. In this paper the authors illustrate the results from a spatially autoregressive regression model and a three-class latent class regression model that convert tweet derived trips to four-step trips accounting for zonal and trip-maker heterogeneity. In these regression models the authors use measures of business density and diversity, and population density as added explanatory/control variables, so that a unit contribution of a tweet trip can be adjusted by land-use effects and the trip producing zones in the twitter data can be explained in a more complete way. Preliminary results are encouraging and show the usefulness of harvested large-scale mobility data from location-based social media. The results also show the added value of latent class regression models in this experiment. The paper concludes with a review of next steps.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB20 Standing Committee on Effects of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on Travel Choices. Alternate title: Can Twitter Data Be Used to Validate Travel Demand Models?
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Lee, Jae Hyun
    • Gao, Song
    • Goulias, Konstadinos G
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2016

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 24p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 95th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01594525
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 16-0069
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Mar 24 2016 10:51AM