Shared Bicycles in a City: A Signal Processing and Data Analysis Perspective

Pierre Borgnat (1) , Céline Robardet (2) , Jean-Baptiste Rouquier (3, 4) , Patrice Abry (1) , Eric Fleury (4, 5) , Patrick Flandrin (1)

1 Phys-ENS - Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS Lyon
2 DM2L - Data Mining and Machine Learning
3 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
4 IXXI - Institut Rhône-Alpin des systèmes complexes
5 DNET - Dynamic Networks

Community shared bicycle systems, such as the Vélo'v program launched in Lyon in May 2005, are public transportation programs that can be studied as a complex system composed of interconnected stations that exchange bicycles. They generate digital footprints that reveal the activity in the city over time and space, making possible a quantitative analysis of movements using bicycles in the city. A careful study relying on nonstationary statistical modeling and data mining allows us to first model the time evolution of the dynamics of movements with Vélo'v, that is mostly cyclostationary over the week with nonstationary evolutions over larger time-scales, and second to disentangle the spatial patterns to understand and visualize the flows of Vélo'v bicycles in the city. This study gives insights on the social behaviors of the users of this intermodal transportation system, the objective being to help in designing and planning policy in urban transportation.

Keywords: Community bicycle sharing program; Vélo'v; Cyclostationarity; Nonstationarity; Dynamic network; Network community

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Signal and Image processing; Computer Science [cs]; Signal and Image Processing; Statistics [stat]; Applications [stat.AP]

Pierre Borgnat, Céline Robardet, Jean-Baptiste Rouquier, Patrice Abry, Eric Fleury, et al.. Shared Bicycles in a City: A Signal Processing and Data Analysis Perspective. Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2011, 14 (3), pp.415-438. ⟨10.1142/S0219525911002950⟩. ⟨ensl-00490325v3⟩