The network‐time prism (NTP) is an extension of the space‐time prism that provides a realistic model of the potential pattern of moving objects in transportation networks. Measuring the similarity among NTPs can be useful for clustering, aggregating, and querying potential mobility patterns. Despite its practical importance, however, there has been little attention given to similarity measures for NTPs. In this research, we develop and evaluate a methodology for measuring the structural similarity between NTPs using the temporal signature approach. The approach extracts the one‐dimensional temporal signature of a selected property of NTPs and applies existing path similarity measures to the signatures. Graph‐theoretic indices play an essential role in summarizing the structural properties of NTPs at each moment. Two extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and compare the performance of graph indices for measuring NTP similarity. An empirical application using bike‐share system data shows that the method is useful for detecting different usage patterns of two heterogenous user groups.

中文翻译：

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使用带有图形索引的时间签名来测量网络时间棱镜的结构相似性

网络时间棱镜（NTP）是时空棱镜的扩展，它为交通网络中的移动物体的潜在模式提供了一个逼真的模型。测量NTP之间的相似性对于群集，聚合和查询潜在的移动性模式很有用。尽管具有实际的重要性，但很少有人关注NTP的相似性度量。在这项研究中，我们开发和评估了一种使用时间签名方法测量NTP之间结构相似性的方法。该方法提取NTP选定属性的一维时间签名，并将现有的路径相似性度量应用于签名。图论指标在每个时刻总结NTP的结构特性方面都起着至关重要的作用。两个广泛的模拟实验证明了该方法的可行性，并比较了用于测量NTP相似度的图形索引的性能。使用自行车共享系统数据的经验应用表明，该方法对于检测两个异构用户组的不同使用模式很有用。