Discovering the hidden community structure of public transportation networks
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As more and more cities adopt the use of smart cards as means to access public transportation networks, it becomes much easier to discover the mobility patterns of individual passengers. A natural way to represent such patters is in the form of graphs. In this paper we analyze the public transportation network of a major metropolitan area from a unique perspective. We present a novel network structure to identify and track the relationships between passenger groups traveling on different vehicles, allowing us to discover the community structure of the users of the transportation network. The proposed network structure can be used to identify the most frequently used travel paths taken by these communities, but more importantly it provides a means to explore possibly hidden contacts of a selected passenger.
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