Going Beyond the Euclidean Setting in the Statistical Analysis of Human Movement in Urban Landscape,

The statistical analysis of human movement within the built environment has always been framed in a Euclidean setting. Due to the intrinsic complexity of the urban landscape and how humans interact with it, reductionism is an element that should be taken carefully into account. Extending the mathematical tools to studying complex data and trying to avoid reductionism in the mathematical representation of the problem is the first step to conduct a meaningful and less reductive quantitative study. Object-Oriented Data Analysis (OODA) is a novel statistical approach aiming at going beyond the classic (and sometimes reductive) Euclidean framework. OODA aims at describing the natural complexity of a type of datum such as graphs, text, trajectories, defining a natural geometrical framework for the datum.