Exploring changes in residents' daily activity patterns through sequence visualization analysis

The analysis of people's daily activities has played a crucial role in various applications, such as urban geography, activity prediction, and homogeneous population detection. However, limited studies have explored changes in the residents’ activity patterns in a particular region across various periods. To explore the changes, a methodological framework of sequence visualization analysis based on machine learning that extracts the activity patterns across various periods using sequence analysis, visualizes the activity patterns by calculating the frequency of different activities at time points and categorizes them through graphical similarity, and then compares the activity patterns in terms of activity and demographic characteristics is proposed. Empirical testing on the New York Metropolitan data of the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) is conducted for 2001, 2009, and 2017. The findings reveal significant intra-similarities, inter-differences, and distinct changes in activity patterns across three periods for different social populations in the New York Metropolitan. From the perspective of information analysis, this work is anticipated to enhance the understanding of travel needs for diverse social populations in a particular region, thereby facilitating targeted policy adjustments for the departments concerned.