Why Topology Matters in Predicting Human Activities

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the topological scaling structure of streets, rather than geometric details, underpins the predictability of collective human activities, emphasizing the importance of topological analysis over segment-based methods.

Contribution

It highlights the significance of topological scaling hierarchy in predicting human activities and shows that natural streets outperform other representations like street segments and axial lines.

Findings

Natural streets best predict human activities.

Scaling hierarchy of streets underpins activity predictability.

Segment-based geometric analysis is less effective.

Abstract

Geographic space is better understood through the topological relationship of the underlying streets (note: entire streets rather than street segments), which enables us to see scaling or fractal or living structure of far more less-connected streets than well-connected ones. It is this underlying scaling structure that makes human activities predictable, albeit in the sense of collective rather than individual human moving behavior. This topological analysis has not yet received its deserved attention in the literature, as many researchers continue to rely on segment analysis for predicting human activities. The segment-analysis-based methods are essentially geometric, with a focus on geometric details of locations, lengths, and directions, and are unable to reveal the scaling property, which means they cannot be used for human activities prediction. We conducted a series of case studies using London streets and tweet location data, based on related concepts such as natural streets, and natural street segments (or street segments for short), axial lines, and axial line segments (or line segments for short). We found that natural streets are the best representation in terms of human activities or traffic prediction, followed by axial lines, and that neither street segments nor line segments bear a good correlation between network parameters and tweet locations. These findings point to the fact that the reason why axial lines-based space syntax, or the kind of topological analysis in general, works has little to do with individual human travel behavior or ways that human conceptualize distances or spaces. Instead, it is the underlying scaling hierarchy of streets - numerous least-connected, a very few most-connected, and some in between the least- and most-connected - that makes human activities predictable.