Calculate the Temporal Network Kernel Density Estimate based on a network of lines, sampling points in space and times, and events in space and time.

tnkde(
  lines,
  events,
  time_field,
  w,
  samples_loc,
  samples_time,
  kernel_name,
  bw_net,
  bw_time,
  adaptive = FALSE,
  adaptive_separate = TRUE,
  trim_bw_net = NULL,
  trim_bw_time = NULL,
  method,
  div = "bw",
  diggle_correction = FALSE,
  study_area = NULL,
  max_depth = 15,
  digits = 5,
  tol = 0.1,
  agg = NULL,
  sparse = TRUE,
  grid_shape = c(1, 1),
  verbose = TRUE,
  check = TRUE
)

Arguments

lines

A feature collection of linestrings representing the underlying network. The geometries must be simple Linestrings (may crash if some geometries are invalid) without MultiLineSring.

events

events A feature collection of points representing the events on the network. The points will be snapped on the network to their closest line.

time_field

The name of the field in events indicating when the events occurred. It must be a numeric field

w

A vector representing the weight of each event

samples_loc

A feature collection of points representing the locations for which the densities will be estimated.

samples_time

A numeric vector indicating when the densities will be sampled

kernel_name

The name of the kernel to use. Must be one of triangle, gaussian, tricube, cosine, triweight, quartic, epanechnikov or uniform.

bw_net

The network kernel bandwidth (using the scale of the lines), can be a single float or a numeric vector if a different bandwidth must be used for each event.

bw_time

The time kernel bandwidth, can be a single float or a numeric vector if a different bandwidth must be used for each event.

adaptive

A Boolean, indicating if an adaptive bandwidth must be used. Both spatial and temporal bandwidths are adapted but separately.

adaptive_separate

A boolean indicating if the adaptive bandwidths for the time and the network dimensions must be calculated separately (TRUE) or in interaction (FALSE)

trim_bw_net

A float, indicating the maximum value for the adaptive network bandwidth

trim_bw_time

A float, indicating the maximum value for the adaptive time bandwidth

method

The method to use when calculating the NKDE, must be one of simple / discontinuous / continuous (see nkde details for more information)

div

The divisor to use for the kernel. Must be "n" (the number of events within the radius around each sampling point), "bw" (the bandwith) "none" (the simple sum).

diggle_correction

A Boolean indicating if the correction factor for edge effect must be used.

study_area

A feature collection of polygons representing the limits of the study area.

max_depth

when using the continuous and discontinuous methods, the calculation time and memory use can go wild if the network has many small edges (area with many of intersections and many events). To avoid it, it is possible to set here a maximum depth. Considering that the kernel is divided at intersections, a value of 10 should yield good estimates in most cases. A larger value can be used without a problem for the discontinuous method. For the continuous method, a larger value will strongly impact calculation speed.

digits

The number of digits to retain from the spatial coordinates. It ensures that topology is good when building the network. Default is 3. Too high a precision (high number of digits) might break some connections

tol

A float indicating the minimum distance between the events and the lines' extremities when adding the point to the network. When points are closer, they are added at the extremity of the lines.

agg

A double indicating if the events must be aggregated within a distance. If NULL, the events are aggregated only by rounding the coordinates.

sparse

A Boolean indicating if sparse or regular matrices should be used by the Rcpp functions. These matrices are used to store edge indices between two nodes in a graph. Regular matrices are faster, but require more memory, in particular with multiprocessing. Sparse matrices are slower (a bit), but require much less memory.

grid_shape

A vector of two values indicating how the study area must be split when performing the calculus. Default is c(1,1) (no split). A finer grid could reduce memory usage and increase speed when a large dataset is used. When using multiprocessing, the work in each grid is dispatched between the workers.

verbose

A Boolean, indicating if the function should print messages about the process.

check

A Boolean indicating if the geometry checks must be run before the operation. This might take some times, but it will ensure that the CRS of the provided objects are valid and identical, and that geometries are valid.

Value

A matrix with the estimated density for each sample point (rows) at each timestamp (columns). If adaptive = TRUE, the function returns a list with two slots: k (the matrix with the density values) and events (a feature collection of points with the local bandwidths).

Details

Temporal Network Kernel Density Estimate
The TNKDE is an extension of the NKDE considering both the location of events on the network and in time. Thus, density estimation (density sampling) can be done along lines of the network and at different time. It can be used with the three NKDE (simple, discontinuous and continuous).

density in time and space
Two bandwidths must be provided, one for the network distance and one for the time distance. They are both used to calculate the contribution of each event to each sampling point. Let us consider one event E and a sample S. dnet(E,S) is the contribution to network density of E at S location and dtime(E,S) is the contribution to time density of E at S time. The total contribution is thus dnet(E,S) * dtime(E,S). If one of the two densities is 0, then the total density is 0 because the sampling point is out of the covered area by the event in time or in the network space.

adaptive bandwidth
It is possible to use an adaptive bandwidth both on the network and in time. Adaptive bandwidths are calculated using the Abramson’s smoothing regimen (Abramson 1982) . To do so, the original fixed bandwidths must be specified (bw_net and bw_time parameters). The maximum size of the two local bandwidths can be limited with the parameters trim_bw_net and trim_bw_time.

Diggle correction factor
A set of events can be limited in both space (limits of the study area) and time ( beginning and ending of the data collection period). These limits induce lower densities at the border of the set of events, because they are not sampled outside the limits. It is possible to apply the Diggle correction factor (Diggle 1985) in both the network and time spaces to minimize this effect.

Separated or simultaneous adaptive bandwidth
When the parameter adaptive is TRUE, one can choose between using separated calculation of network and temporal bandwidths, and calculating them simultaneously. In the first case (default), the network bandwidths are determined for each event by considering only their locations and the time bandwidths are determined by considering only there time stamps. In the second case, for each event, the spatio-temporal density at its location on the network and in time is estimated and used to determine both the network and temporal bandwidths. This second approach must be preferred if the events are characterized by a high level of spatio-temporal autocorrelation.

Examples

# \donttest{
# loading the data
data(mtl_network)
data(bike_accidents)

# converting the Date field to a numeric field (counting days)
bike_accidents$Time <- as.POSIXct(bike_accidents$Date, format = "%Y/%m/%d")
start <- as.POSIXct("2016/01/01", format = "%Y/%m/%d")
bike_accidents$Time <- difftime(bike_accidents$Time, start, units = "days")
bike_accidents$Time <- as.numeric(bike_accidents$Time)

# creating sample points
lixels <- lixelize_lines(mtl_network, 50)
sample_points <- lines_center(lixels)

# choosing sample in times (every 10 days)
sample_time <- seq(0, max(bike_accidents$Time), 10)

# calculating the densities
tnkde_densities <- tnkde(lines = mtl_network,
    events = bike_accidents, time_field = "Time",
    w = rep(1, nrow(bike_accidents)),
    samples_loc = sample_points,
    samples_time = sample_time,
    kernel_name = "quartic",
    bw_net = 700, bw_time = 60, adaptive = TRUE,
    trim_bw_net = 900, trim_bw_time = 80,
    method = "discontinuous", div = "bw",
    max_depth = 10, digits = 2, tol = 0.01,
    agg = 15, grid_shape = c(1,1),
    verbose  = FALSE)
# }