Geographical and temporal huff model calibration using taxi trajectory data

The Huff model is designed to estimate the probability of shopping centre patronage based on a shopping centre’s attractiveness and the cost of a customer’s travel. In this paper, we attempt to discover some general shopping trends by calibrating the Huff model in Shenzhen, China, and New York, USA, using taxi trajectory GPS data and sharing bikes GPS data. Geographical and Temporal Weighted Regression (GTWR) is used to fit the model, and calibration results are compared with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, Geographical Weighted Regression (GWR), and Temporal Weighted Regression (TWR). Results show that GTWR gives the highest performance due to significant geographical and temporal variation in the Huff model parameters of attractiveness and travel cost. To explain the geographical variation, we use residential sales’ and rental prices in Shenzhen and New York as a proxy for customers’ wealth in each region. Pearson product-moment correlation results show a medium relationship between localised sales’ and rental prices and the Huff model parameter of attractiveness: that is, customer wealth explains geographic sensitivity to shopping area attractiveness. To explain temporal variation, we use census data in both Shenzhen and New York to provide job profile distributions for each region as a proxy to estimate customers’ spare leisure time. Regression results demonstrate that there is a significant linear relationship between the length of spare time and the parameter of shopping area attractiveness. In particular, we demonstrate that wealthy customers with less spare time are more sensitive to a shopping centre’s attractiveness. We also discover customers’ sensitivities to travel distance are related to their travel mode. In particular, people riding bikes to shopping areas care much more about trip distance compared with people who take taxi. Finally, results show a divergence in behaviours between customers in New York and Shenzhen at weekends. While customers in New York prefer to shop more locally at weekends, customers in Shenzhen care less about trip distance. We provide the GTWR calibration of the Huff model as our theoretical contribution. GTWR extends the Huff model to two dimensions (time and space), so as to analyse the differences of residents’ travel behaviours in different time and locations. We also provide the discoveries of factors affecting urban travel behaviours (wealth and employment) as practical contributions that may help optimise urban transportation design. In particular, the sensitivity of residents to the attraction of shopping areas has a significant positive linear relationship with the housing price and a significant negative linear relationship with the residents’ length of spare time.