A statistical approach for studying urban human dynamics

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information SystemsThis doctoral dissertation proposed several statistical approaches to analyse urban dynamics with aiming to provide tools for decision making processes and urban studies. It assumed that human activity and human mobility compose urban dynamics. Initially, it studied geolocated social media data and considered them as a proxy for where and when people carry out what it is defined as the human activity. It employed techniques associated with generalised linear models, functional data analysis, hierarchical clustering, and epidemic data, to explain the spatio-temporal distribution of the places where people interact with their social networks. Afterwards, to understand the mobility in urban environments, data coming from an underground railway system were used. The information was considered repeated daily measurements to capture the regularity of human behaviour. By implementing methods from functional principal components data analysis and hierarchical clustering, it was possible to describe the system and identify human mobility patterns

Multiscale evaluation of an urban deprivation index : implications for quality of life and healthcare accessibility planning

Deprivation indices are widely used to identify areas characterized by above average social and/or material disadvantages. Especially spatial approaches have become increasingly popular since they enable decision makers to identify priority areas and to allocate their resources accordingly. An array of methods and spatial reporting units have been used to analyze and report deprivation in previous studies. However, a comparative analysis and assessment of the implications of the choice of the reporting unit for quality of life and health care accessibility planning is still missing. Based on a set of ten socioeconomic and health-related indicators, we constructed a weighted deprivation index for the urban area of Quito, Ecuador, using four different reporting units, including census blocks, census tracts, and two units based on the automatic zoning procedure (AZP). Spatial statistics and metrics are used to compare the resulting units, and a participatory expert-based approach is applied to evaluate their suitability for decision making processes. Besides structural differences regarding their size and shape, no strongly marked statistical or qualitative differences were found in the four analyzed spatial representations of deprivation. The four representations revealed similar spatial patterns of deprivation, with higher levels of deprivation in the peripheries of the city, especially in the southern and north-western parts. The study also suggests that census blocks, due to their fine spatial resolution, were considered most useful for quality of life and health care accessibility planning by local stakeholders.DK W 1237-N23(VLID)231661

Data Analysis of Spatial Interaction : Study of Forced Internal Displacement in Colombia for the period 2007-2013 .

Esta monografía trata del filtrado espacial (ESF) con funciones propias para el modelado del desplazamiento forzado en Colombia durante el período 2007-2013. El logro principal consiste en identificar variables explicativas que aportan significancia al modelo y que son derivadas del proceso de filtrado.This monograph is the spatial filtering (ESF ) with own for modeling the forced displacement in Colombia during the period 2007-2013 functions. The main achievement is to identify significant explanatory variables that contribute to the model and that are derived from the filtering process

Effects of scale in spatial interaction models

We study the e ects of aggregation on four di erent cases of non linear spatial gravity models. We present some theoretical results on the relationship between the mean ows at an aggregated level and the mean ow at the disaggregated level. We then focus on the case of perfect aggregation (scale problem) showing some results based on the theoretical expressions previously derived and on some arti cial data. The main aim is to test the e ects on the aggregated ows on the spatial dependence observed in the origin and in the destination variables. We show that positive spatial dependence in the origin and destination variables moderate the increase of the mean ows connatural with aggregation while negative spatial dependence exacerbates it