Entry Name "MAGUIRE-MC1"
VAST Challenge 2017
Mini-Challenge 1

Team Members:
Eamonn Maguire eamonnmag@gmail.com

Student Team: NO

Tools Used:
Jupyter Notebook
Pandas
Numpy
Matplotlib
NetworkX

Approximately how many hours were spent working on this submission in total?
48

May we post your submission in the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2017 is complete? YES


Questions

1 "Patterns of Life" analyses depend on recognizing repeating patterns of activities by individuals or groups. Describe up to six daily patterns of life by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, if I drove to a coffee house every morning, but did not stay for long, you might hypothesize I'm getting coffee 'to-go'). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

Passing Through Behaviour

This behaviour involves cars passing through the park, generally within approximately 20-30 mins. There are 1778 such events in the data. There are also visitors who pass through the park through some general-gates however.

Campers

Daily camp site visitors don't stay the night. They generally come in the summer and autumn months, with some visits in the winter. They come largely at the weekend, and generally appear from 5am until 5/6pm.

Rangers

Rangers operate between 6am and midnight on all days of the week. They never pass an entrance boundary, and typically visit all parts, albeit with varying frequencies. For instance, they always return to the ranger base, however, visits to the camp sites and some gates is very low.

Buses

Buses generally come at all points of the day, but don't spend a lot of time in the reserve (max of 2 hours). They come at all hours of the day. They never stop at camp sites, and only ever pass go by entrances, general gates, and ranger stops.

4 Axel Trucks

Trucks come more in the summer and autumn, stay less than 2 hours, and appear with equal frequency each day of the week. They are likely to appear at any point of the day, but most probably at 3:00,4:00 and 16:00 hours. They have a high path similarity to buses, which may be due to road constraints.


2 Patterns of Life analyses may also depend on understanding what patterns appear over longer periods of time (in this case, over multiple days). Describe up to six patterns of life that occur over multiple days (including across the entire data set) by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, many vehicles showing up at the same location each Saturday at the same time may suggest some activity occurring there each Saturday). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

Single Night Stay over Behaviour

Generally speaking, all vehicle types have the same general behaviour. They turn up largely during the summer, arrive between 6am and 5pm, and leave between 5am and 9pm. Camp site 5 is the most popular, and camp site 1 is the least popular.

Different Campsite popularity over time (1 night stay)

Depending on the month, some camp sites are more popular than others. In January, only camping0 is used. Then in Feb, Camping5 and Camping4. All camp sites are busy during the summer apart from camping1.

Extended Stay

We generally see the same trends as for a single overnight stay, however we also add the length of time someone stays for where we see that the majority of visitors stay for less than 7 days.

3 Unusual patterns may be patterns of activity that changes from an established pattern, or are just difficult to explain from what you know of a situation. Describe up to six unusual patterns (either single day or multiple days) and highlight why you find them unusual. Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

Early Morning Campsite Visits (< 1 hour)

This behaviour shows some potentially suspect behaviour where there is a visit to a campsite early in the morning. The visits here last less than 1 hour, which is why it's particularly interesting. It may simply be a good viewing spot for some wildlife, or that that someone is robbing the campsite (if I'm being particularly pessimistic) .


Illegitimate Gate Passing

Only park rangers should pass through gates, however this group of events shows probably the same visitor passing through the gates early in the morning (between 2am and 5am) with a 4-axel truck always along the same path, in the exact same order. They appear to pick up activity after spring, so maybe looking for chicks or young animals. The visit also lasts less than 1 hour.

Speeding

Two cars exceed the speed limit within a few seconds of each other. The cars in question (20151320031302-782 and 20151320031302-558) would look to have been racing perhaps on first glance, however they don't start at the same time, and there's quite a big difference in speeds. 20151320031302-782 is approaching a speed almost at 50mph and 20151320031302-558 reaches approximately 37 mph. But if they aren't racing, they must be trying to get somewhere in a hurry. The event occurs at 3pm and they are both 2-axel cars.

Very Long Stays

Two visitors have stayed more than anyone else in the park. One for 108 days (20154519024544-322), the other for 350 days (20155705025759-63)

4 What are the top 3 patterns you discovered that you suspect could be most impactful to bird life in the nature preserve? (Short text answer)

The key concerns here would most likely be the traffic at night time, as we see a large amount of traffic throughout the day, especially during the summer. But even during spring, where birds are mating, trucks and other vehicles are using the reserve as a sort of by-pass.

An additional concern is the strange behaviour by vehicle type 4 as stated in the answer to question 3 where vehicles are coming to the reserve very early, and leaving very quickly. This could either be a theft or innocent behaviour, but it is too repetitive to be ruled out.

A final concern would be the very long stays in the reserve by a number of clients which could disrupt the wildlife.