A Rose-diagram Based Approach for Analyzing Movement Patterns of Socioeconomic Gravity Center Trajectories

The movement trajectories of socioeconomic gravity centers can reflect the characteristics of micro and macro geographical structure evolution, while the correlation of gravity center trajectories indicates geographic relationships between different socioeconomic attributes. In this paper, we combine the analysis methods for entity object trajectories with geographic Center-of-Gravity models. We analyze movement patterns of trajectories generated from socioeconomic data as represented through directional rose-diagrams. A directional rose-diagram for trajectories allows analyzing movement patterns of socioeconomic gravity center trajectories from both individual and global scales. We also can extract the gravity center trajectories displaying significant patterns by tortuosity analysis. Besides, the half directional rose-diagram, an analysis tool especially for trajectory pairs, can intuitively express the relative relationship between two center trajectories. We take the trajectories of the center of gravity for 40 economic indicatorsin mainland China from 1985 to 2004 and mine their movement patterns as an example. This experiment provides a set of effective exploratory spatial-temporal data analysis tools for the study of socioeconomic data.