An exploratory framework for studying movement pattern

This paper introduces a new exploratory framework to identify and estimate the local characteristics associated with the distribution of the distances and the directions for the movements. The focus of attention is paid to hundreds and thousands individual records of movement. Traditional methods were either unable to handle the vast data or limited to search the global “law”. As an initial work, the framework focuses on the origin-destination form of movements, which is parallel to a vector composed by distance and direction. The analysis is working on the distribution of such two elements, with the stressing on how the distribution is differentiated over space. By stressing the local variation, it quantitatively estimates the difference between the patterns for global data and for local data.