Integrating time stamps into discovering the places of interest

Abstract

With the employment of GPS embedded device, large numbers of data has been collected from location aware applications. It is interesting and challenging to discover meaningful information behind the data. Since the GPS data contains the time information, we take use of the time stamps of the GPS data in this paper for better discovering the places of interest. The collection usually contains large amounts of trajectories, where not every point has information. Therefore, a time stamp clustering algorithm is firstly proposed to reduce the size of raw data and also extract the points with more information. Different clustering algorithms are then conducted on the pre-processed data for extracting the places of interest. Finally, we compare the clustering algorithms on the GPS data by several external validity indexes. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.