A novel metric to measure spatio-temporal proximity: a case study analyzing children’s social network in schoolyards

We evaluate the proposed method on real data to show how the proposed metric impacts the performance of a clustering task. Second, this metric is used to interpret interactions in a real-world dataset collected from children playing in a playground. Moreover, by considering spatial features, this metric provides unique knowledge of the spatio-temporal accessibility of individuals in a community, and more clearly captures pairwise accessibility compared with existing temporal metrics.

Thus, it can facilitate domain scientists interested in understanding social behavior in the spatio-temporal context.