OpenUAS: Embeddings of Cities in Japan with Anchor Data for Cross-city Analysis of Area Usage Patterns

TL;DR

OpenUAS provides a publicly available dataset of urban area embeddings for Japanese cities, enabling cross-city analysis of land use patterns without sharing raw location data, thus supporting urban planning and analysis.

Contribution

We introduce an anchoring method that allows embedding areas from different cities and periods into a shared space without raw location data, and release a comprehensive dataset for research.

Findings

Dataset covers over 1.3 million areas across eight Japanese cities.

Anchoring method enables cross-city and temporal comparison of urban areas.

Public release facilitates research in urban planning and related fields.

Abstract

We publicly release OpenUAS, a dataset of area embeddings based on urban usage patterns, including embeddings for over 1.3 million 50-meter square meshes covering a total area of 3,300 square kilometers. This dataset is valuable for analyzing area functions in fields such as market analysis, urban planning, transportation infrastructure, and infection prediction. It captures the characteristics of each area in the city, such as office districts and residential areas, by employing an area embedding technique that utilizes location information typically obtained by GPS. Numerous area embedding techniques have been proposed, and while the public release of such embedding datasets is technically feasible, it has not been realized. One reason for this is that previous methods could not embed areas from different cities and periods into the same embedding space without sharing raw location data. We address this issue by developing an anchoring method that establishes anchors within a shared embedding space. We publicly release this anchor dataset along with area embedding datasets from several periods in eight major Japanese cities.