A Data Fusion Framework for Exploring Mobility Around Disruptive Events (Short Paper)

This paper proposes a data fusion framework that seeks to investigate joint mobility signals around wildfires in relation to geographic scale of analysis (level of spatial aggregation), as well as spatial and temporal extents (i.e. distance to the event and duration of the observation period). We highlight the usefulness of our framework using intra-urban mobility data from Mapbox and SafeGraph for two wildfires in California: Lake Fire (August-September 2020, Los Angeles County) and Silverado Fire (October-November 2020, Orange County). We identify two distinct patterns of mobility behavior: one associated with the wildfire event and another one - with the routine daily mobility of the nearby urban core. Using the combination of data fusion and tensor decomposition, the framework allows us to capture additional insights from the data, that were otherwise unavailable in raw mobility data