TensorAnalyzer: Identification of Urban Patterns in Big Cities using Non-Negative Tensor Factorization

Extracting relevant urban patterns from multiple data sources can be difficult using classical clustering algorithms since we have to make a suitable setup of the hyperparameters of the algorithms and deal with outliers. It should be addressed correctly to help urban planners in the decision-making process for the further development of a big city. For instance, experts' main interest in criminology is comprehending the relationship between crimes and the socio-economic characteristics at specific georeferenced locations. In addition, the classical clustering algorithms take little notice of the intricate spatial correlations in georeferenced data sources. This paper presents a new approach to detecting the most relevant urban patterns from multiple data sources based on tensor decomposition. Compared to classical methods, the proposed approach's performance is attested to validate the identified patterns' quality. The result indicates that the approach can effectively identify functional patterns to characterize the data set for further analysis in achieving good clustering quality. Furthermore, we developed a generic framework named TensorAnalyzer, where the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed methodology are tested by a set of experiments and a real-world case study showing the relationship between the crime events around schools and students performance and other variables involved in the analysis.