Urban Analytics: Multiplexed and Dynamic Community Networks

In the past decade, cities have experienced rapid growth, expansion, and changes in their community structure. Many aspects of critical urban infrastructure are closely coupled with the human communities that they serve. Urban communities are composed of a multiplex of overlapping factors which can be distinguished into cultural, religious, social-economic, political, and geographical layers.

In this paper, we review how increasingly available heterogeneous mobile big data sets can be leveraged to detect the community interaction structure using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. A number of community layer and interaction detection algorithms are then reviewed, with a particular focus on robustness, stability, and causality of evolving communities.

The better understanding of the structural dynamics and multiplexed relationships can provide useful information to inform both urban planning policies and shape the design of socially coupled urban infrastructure systems, such as socially-driven computing and communication networks.