  Statistical traffic data analysis is a hot topic in traffic management and
control. In this field, current research progresses focus on analyzing traffic
flows of individual links or local regions in a transportation network. Less
attention are paid to the global view of traffic states over the entire
network, which is important for modeling large-scale traffic scenes. Our aim is
precisely to propose a new methodology for extracting spatio-temporal traffic
patterns, ultimately for modeling large-scale traffic dynamics, and long-term
traffic forecasting. We attack this issue by utilizing Locality-Preserving
Non-negative Matrix Factorization (LPNMF) to derive low-dimensional
representation of network-level traffic states. Clustering is performed on the
compact LPNMF projections to unveil typical spatial patterns and temporal
dynamics of network-level traffic states. We have tested the proposed method on
simulated traffic data generated for a large-scale road network, and reported
experimental results validate the ability of our approach for extracting
meaningful large-scale space-time traffic patterns. Furthermore, the derived
clustering results provide an intuitive understanding of spatial-temporal
characteristics of traffic flows in the large-scale network, and a basis for
potential long-term forecasting.
