Additive Compositionality in Urban Area Embeddings Based on Human Mobility Patterns

Understanding the characteristics of various urban areas is crucial for applications such as urban planning, tourism policies, market analysis, and infection control. Techniques for embedding areas as vectors in a latent space based on human mobility patterns are actively researched. Many of these area embedding methods define areas as points, grids, or polygons on a geospatial plane and then embed them. However, existing methods do not allow for mutual transformation between these forms and sizes after the initial embedding. Additionally, if the characteristics of an area change due to events such as the opening of new buildings, re-embedding is necessary. Meanwhile, the Word2Vec technique, a representative word embedding method, has a property called additive compositionality. This property allows for the arithmetic operation of word meanings through the arithmetic operations of word embeddings. In this paper, we propose a method to apply this property to existing area embedding techniques, leveraging it for practical tasks such as area shape transformation and searching for areas with trends change.