Ranking Station Importance with Human Mobility Patterns Using Subway Network Datasets

Complex networks have become an active interdisciplinary field of research inspired by the empirical study of various networks. A subway network is a real-world example of complex networks in the transportation domain, which has attracted growing attention in network analysis recently. Analyzing human mobility patterns, specifically in ranking subway stations closely bounded by urban subway planning and individuals’ travel experience, is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel ranking method of station importance (SIRank) by utilizing human mobility patterns and improved PageRank algorithm. Specifically, by analyzing human mobility patterns of the subway system in Shanghai, we demonstrate both static and dynamic characteristics using two network models (Shanghai subway static network and Shanghai subway passenger network). In particular, the SIRank focuses on bi-directional passenger flow analysis between origins and destinations to iteratively generate the importance value for each station. We implement a range of the experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of SIRank using the real-world subway transaction datasets. The results demonstrate that the hit ratio in SIRank reaches 60% in the top five stations, which is much higher than that of ranking by a weighted mixed index (WMIRank) and ranking by node degree (NDRank) approaches.