Identifying Hot Lines of Urban Spatial Structure Using Cellphone Call Detail Record Data

The rapid growth of cell phone users in cities enable the cell phone towers spread all over urban area in past years. The user call logs, which refer to users movement trajectory in urban area, can provide an opportunity to understand urban spatial structure. As the extraction of more popular channel of human movement in urban area, the hot lines highlighted the spatial morphology of human flows in urban structure. In this paper, we propose popularity index that utilizes diversity and density index of channel to identify the hot lines based on cell phone call detail record dataset. The density of cell phone users that travel across one channel and the diversity of travel behaviors from different cell phone users refer to one channel has been combined to infer the level of popularity index for each channel. In the case study, a call detail record dataset that generated from the users of an anonymous telecom in Wuhan has been applied to identify the hot lines. The results showed the effectiveness of our approach and can be used as references for more explicitly representing urban dynamics to support urban plan applications.