Potential landscapes reveal spatiotemporal structure in urban mobility: Hodge decomposition and principal component analysis of Tokyo before and during COVID-19

Abstract Understanding human mobility is vital to solving societal challenges, such as epidemic control and urban transportation optimization. Recent advancements in data collection now enable the exploration of dynamic mobility patterns in human flow. However, the vast volume and complexity of mobility data make it difficult to interpret spatiotemporal patterns directly, necessitating effective information reduction. The core challenge is to balance data simplification with information preserva