Urban scale trade area characterization for commercial districts with cellular footprints

Understanding customer mobility patterns to commercial districts is crucial for urban planning, facility management, and business strategies. Trade areas are a widely applied measure to quantify where the visitors are from. Traditional trade area analysis is limited to small-scale or store-level studies, because information such as visits to competitor commercial entities and place of residence is collected by labour-intensive questionnaires or heavily biased location-based social media data. In this article, we propose CellTradeMap, a novel district-level trade area analysis framework using mobile flow records (MFRs), a type of fine-grained cellular network data. We show that compared to traditional cellular data and social network check-in data, MFRs can model customer mobility patterns comprehensively at urban scale. CellTradeMap extracts robust location information from the irregularly sampled, noisy MFRs, adapts the generic trade area analysis framework to incorporate cellular data, and enhances the original trade area model with cellular-based features. We evaluate CellTradeMap on two large-scale cellular network datasets covering 3.5 million and 1.8 million mobile phone users in two metropolis in China, respectively. Experimental results show that the trade areas extracted by CellTradeMap are aligned with domain knowledge and CellTradeMap can model trade areas with a high predictive accuracy. © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery.