Abstract: Mobile phone data help us to understand human activities. Researchers have investigated the characteristics and relationships of human activities and regional function using information from physical and virtual spaces. However, how to establish location mapping between spaces to explore the relationships between mobile phone call activity and regional function remains unclear. In this paper, we employ a self-organizing map (SOM) to map locations with 24-dimensional activity attributes and identify relationships between users’ mobile phone call activities and regional functions. We apply mobile phone call data from Harbin, a city in northeast China, to build the location mapping relationships between user clusters of mobile phone call activity and points of interest (POI) composition in geographical space. The results indicate that for mobile phone call activities, mobile phone users are mapped to five locations that represent particular mobile phone call patterns. Regarding regional functions, we identified nine unique types of functional areas that are related to production, business, entertainment and education according to the patterns of users and POI proportions. We then explored the correlations between users and POIs for each type of area. The results of this research provide new insights into the relationships between human activity and regional functions.
To cite this article: Weihua, D., Shengkai, W., Yu, L., 2021. Mapping relationships between mobile phone call activity and regional function using self-organizing map. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 87, 101624.