A grid-based approach for measuring similarities of taxi trajectories

Abstract

Similarity measurement is one of the key tasks in spatial data analysis. It has a great impact on applications i.e., position prediction, mining and analysis of social behavior pattern. Existing methods mainly focus on the exact matching of polylines which result in the trajectories. However, for the applications like travel/drive behavior analysis, even for objects passing by the same route the trajectories are not the same due to the accuracy of positioning and the fact that objects may move on different lanes of the road. Further, in most cases of spatial data mining, locations and sometimes sequences of locations on trajectories are most important, while how objects move from location to location (the exact geometries of trajectories) is of less interest. For the abovementioned situations, the existing approaches cannot work anymore. In this paper, we propose a grid aware approach to convert trajectories into sequences of codes, so that shape details of trajectories are neglected while emphasizing locations where trajectories pass through. Experiments with Shanghai Float Car Data (FCD) show that the proposed method can calculate trajectories with high similarity if these pass through the same locations. In addition, the proposed methods are very efficient since the data volume is considerably reduced when trajectories are converted into grid-codes.