f). BDC Seminar Series | 11th December 2018

Title:

“Geographically weighted flow modelling and its new challenges”

Abstract:

In the era of big data, increasing availability of mobility data captured through sensors, smart card, transaction and users/citizens has offered great opportunity for spatio-temporal modelling of flows (people and goods). Geographically weighted regression, as a local modelling method, has been extensively applied for analysing spatial non-stationarity. However, flow data, resulting from spatial interactions, usually exhibit an over-dispersion statistical pattern and a complicated spatial structure. This study aims to explore the spatial non-stationarity present in flow data by developing and calibrating geographically weighted negative binominal flow models. The flow models are applied for analysing determinants of traffic flows on motorway across a province and temporal migration patterns across a country. In the latter case, flow models have been further extended by incorporating spatial interaction constraints. The preliminary results have revealed spatial heterogeneity in the models of geographical mobility. This study has also helped address new challenges for flow modelling including visualisation and geo-computation.

Author:

Dr Jianquan (James) Cheng is a reader of urban studies at the School of Science and the Environment, MMU and also associated with MMU Crime and Well-being Big Data Centre. James’s research interests include urban analytics and urbanisation of China. His recent research is focused on sustainable healthy city. James gained his PhD degree in human geography and urban planning from Utrecht University (Netherlands) in addition to a MSc in GIS for urban applications from Twente University (Netherlands) and a BSc in computational mathematics from Shandong University (China). He has worked in Wuhan University (China) for more than 10 years before joining MMU.

Dr Cheng Jin is an associate professor in human geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing Normal University (China). Cheng’s research interests are more focused on tourism mobility and regional studies. Cheng is currently collaborating with James in the area of mobility modelling as an academic visitor (between April 2018 and March 2019) at MMU. Cheng obtained his PhD and MSc in human geography from Nanjing Normal University.