A visual-based toolkit to support mobility data analytics

Highlights

• Visual analytics platforms lack support for handling mobility data in ITS scenarios.
• We present a visual-based toolkit to support mobility data analytics for ITS.
• The solution allows practitioners to perform complex analyses without writing code.
• The solution is open-source and integrated within the KNIME Analytics Platform.
• The effectiveness of the solution is assessed in a real-world ITS analytics scenario.

Abstract

The Knowledge Discovery from Data (KDD) process is widely used across various domains to get valuable insights from data. Many platforms, like KNIME or RapidMiner, offer effective tools for KDD analysts, allowing them to perform data analytics tasks in a visual fashion, without writing code. In recent years, the increasing availability of mobility data has led to a surge in KDD-based initiatives from both industry and academia in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) domain. Still, KDD platforms lack comprehensive support for some typical mobility data manipulation tasks. As a result, mobility data analysis still requires a significant coding phase, with reduced productivity and hindered replicability of results.

To address this gap, this paper presents a novel solution aimed at supporting ITS data analysts in defining KDD processes more efficiently. More in detail, we extended the KNIME platform by introducing a collection of new components explicitly tailored to facilitate some peculiar KDD tasks from mobility data. These components encompass critical functionalities such as map coverage analysis, trajectory partitioning and map-matching.

To showcase the effectiveness of the proposed solution, we used it to replicate a study published in the ITS data analytics domain. Thanks to our proposal, such replication can be accomplished in a few minutes and with just a few clicks, without any manual coding, resulting in a pipeline that is easier to understand, distribute and re-execute, also for domain experts with no programming experience.

Our solution is open-source and freely downloadable from the Knime Hub. In this way, we aim to foster data-driven research and practice in the ITS field, by providing researchers and practitioners with more effective analytics tools to handle mobility data.

Data and Code

All the custom KNIME nodes we developed, along with their source code and detailed documentation and installation instructions, are freely available at the public . The dataset we employed and the complete KNIME workflow we described in the paper are available as well at the public DOI for replication purposes.