Association and Correlation Analysis

Abstract

In the face of the complexity of urban transportation, with an approach based on big data to seek various connections in the system, identify the signs of problems, verify the hypotheses, and explore the unknown laws, the significance of association analysis has far extended beyond the simple concept of data mining.

Today, wherever we look, we find evolution, diversification and instabilities. we long have known that we are living in a pluralistic world in which we find deterministic as well as stochastic phenomena, reversible as well as irreversible. We observe deterministic phenomena such as the frictionless pendulum or the trajectory of the moon around the earth, moreover, we know that the frictionless pendulum is reversible, because the past and the future play exactly the same role in the equation describing the motion. But other processes are irreversible, as diffusion, or chemical reactions. In this case, there is a specific temporal direction: as time goes on, the original non-uniform system will become uniform. Furthermore, we are obliged to acknowledge the existence of stochastic processes, because it frees us from the absurd perception that the natural phenomena with great diversity are arranged in an established manner just like the Big Ben .

—Ilya Prigogine [1].