Home page for the SDSR project
Submit a review of the project proposal and presentations. Each team should submit approx. 500 words review using the following form.
Submit a review of the project proposal and presentations. Each team should submit approx. 500 words review using the following form.
Group 6 intends to utilize methods from both a co-location pattern discovery paper and a spatial co-location pattern discovery paper for traffic data to find patterns in rush-hour traffic. Their main contribution, the Equity-aware participation Index (EPI), is the novel part of their proposed project and will evaluate the results of the co-location analysis. The Group clearly stated their intent in their proposal paper and slides: discover patterns that can help inform policy makers.
However, they do not provide any examples of what patterns they would count as a novel find, or how policy can be improved from their findings. For example, if they find that hotspots for rush-hour traffic occur en route to cities or towns in morning rush hour then they only found a known, expected and acceptable trend. A useful trend may be uncovered with how hot spot behavior changes in light of road construction or the introduction of new routes. Changes in hotspots can help policymakers introduce rules to reroute traffic during construction and plan construction costs more accurately.
The formula in the ‘proposed approach’ section of their paper and ‘experimental methodology’ section of their slides states that the EPI is the pariticipation index divided by the ratio between the community population and total regional population. This index can help highlight how much a hotspot effects a specific community when compared to the rest of the region as long as the community is part of the region and the route the traffic takes place in is part of the communities’ regular route. It might be possible to add an additional measure to their EPI that takes into account how useful the route is to the community, or to prune communities from being part of their EPI measure. This isn’t necessarily a weakness in their new measure, as much as a weakness of the PI. It is likely that a community’s utilization of a section of road can be a mapped part of their pre-processing.
My biggest concern with their paper is that their figures’ labels include either a title or less than 10 words to summarize them. The ‘spatial co-location’ section of the ‘related work’ section has a figure, Figure 4, that only includes the names of the authors and publishing date. There are no details about what is being presented, nor a reference for the reader to follow up with. The paragraph in the ‘spatial co-location’ section doesn’t reference nor explain the figure either. While the figure will have a description in the paper they cite, that context may only be appropriate for that paper and not for their proposal. I suggest that Group 6 adds: a references list at the end of their proposal and a numeric citation to connect the figure to the paper; a brief description that is either taken directly from the source (if appropriate) or in their own words if it better fits their proposal; and an explanation of how the figure connects the related work to their approach.
One last interesting item I think is noteworthy is in the ‘limitations of existing work’ section of the paper. One of the limitations stated is that spatial equity studies focus on infrastructure access and not dynamic risk exposure from traffic accidents or congestion. I am not sure if I understand how the two are separate, but would love to see this point potentially expanded on or investigated if time permits. If infrastucture can be shown to have a larger or smaller impact on equity than traffic, then it could open the door for redesigning roads, reprioritizing public transit relative to roads, or even clarifying the kinds of infrastructure that policymakers should prioritize for various communities. They may also be able to compare EPIs to see if there is a consistent pattern in infrastucture and if it is correlated with worsening congestions.