Analysing Relationships Among Streets Through Correlation Analysis of the Dublin Pedestrian Footfall Dataset

Abstract

This article examines the relationships among the 15 streets in the Dublin footfall dataset. Understanding interdependencies and differences in pedestrian activity patterns across streets in Dublin City Centre is essential for informed urban planning, retail strategies, and effective management of urban spaces, yet such spatial-temporal relationships remain underexplored in available sensor-based footfall data. This study utilised pedestrian footfall data collected via PYRO-BOX Counters sensors provided by Dublin City Council and the National Transport Authority (NTA). The analysis began with careful data preprocessing, including cleaning, standardisation of street column names, handling missing values through forward-fill imputation techniques, and deletion of some columns after learning of relationships between them. Hourly pedestrian counts were aggregated to daily totals to better capture long-term movement patterns relevant to street-level comparisons. A Pearson correlation heatmap was created to examine how the streets in Dublin City Centre relate to one another. This visualisation revealed different groups of streets with comparable activity patterns, clearly emphasising the interdependence and differences among them. These groupings highlight shared temporal behaviours alongside distinct variations in pedestrian footfall across locations. The findings provide a basis for better-informed urban planning and policy decisions by shedding light on how various locations interact with one another. This analysis contributes meaningfully to urban informatics by illustrating street-level relationships and inter-dependence in footfall data, thereby supporting more responsive infrastructures, enhanced city services, retail and commercial planning, and sustainable urban growth as business will know where to locate themselves so as to get a high number of customers by choosing streets that have high footfall and urban planners will know how to plan the city in terms of green spaces and street paths depending on the number of people using the different available streets.