Exploring the Individual Travel Patterns Utilizing Large-Scale Highway Transaction Dataset

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents a comparison study to investigate travel patterns using K-means, Fuzzy C-means, and SOM (Self-organizing Map) models. It also provides an analysis of individual, temporal and spatial attributes. The results show that the self-organizing mapping achieves better performance and stability than other models.

The paper can be further improved from the following aspects:

The paper does not include a comparison with the current state of the art. The authors should show that the data or approach the authors studied works better in some way. Moreover, I think that what would be relevant is the comparison with the state-of-the-art methods for investigating travel patterns. It is necessary to verify the proposed model on more relevant attributes.

I would strongly advise the authors should rewrite their Abstract. The originality of this paper is relatively lacking. For example, what is an “analysis framework”? The paper does not describe it in detail.

In the Introduction, even though it is already mentioned yet, the author should highlight motivation and contribution in separate paragraphs. 

Authors should reorganize the Methodology section. For example, The numbers “4. Methodology” and “3.1K-means Model” are wrong.

It is recommended that the author proofreads the article for language and grammar. 

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is well presented. It is an interesting topic for using the clustering method for traffic patterns analysis.

In the elbow method used to determine the cluster number, value 6 was choosen. Need more detail explanation and justification for this choice. Moreover, where is the elbow? and the authors need to define what is the elbow?

Although, there are need correction for the typing. Such as in section 3.1 it needs space.

In the section 5 on Result and Discussion, the authors need to check the citation on the Figures, such as in paragraph 7 mention ‘Figure 4 presents the temporal travel patterns….’ This is not correct, it should be Figure 5 not Figure 4?

In Figure 5, it is difficult to get the meaning of the graph. How to differences between morning, afternoon, and night peak, as it is not well represented, and the plot seem overlap.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

My comment is not solved perfectly. Therefore, I suggest that the author make further improvements.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript has been revised according to reviewer's comments. However, regarding the elbow method with 6 clusters, the manuscript does not give strong justification. As this part is the main result to direct the conclusion, the decision needs to be supported by evident, related performance metrics and references.

Author Response

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Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have responded the comment. However, the response is not satisfactory as it does not elaborate or give detail for the selection of elbow value 6. Instead, it was responded by citing a reference. This is inappropriate as different case or prroblems will lead to different value and it is valuable for readers to know the justification and validation of the proposed value.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx