Ranking based activity trajectory search

Abstract

With the proliferation of the GPS-enabled devices and mobile techniques, there has been a lot of work on trajectory search in the last decade. Previous trajectory search has focused on spatio-temporal features and text descriptions. Different from them, we study a novel problem of searching trajectories with activities and corresponding ranking information. Given a query q, which is attached with a set of activities and a threshold of distance, the results of ranking based activity trajectory search (RTS) are k trajectories such that the given activities are performed with the highest ranking within the threshold of distance. In addition, we also extend the query with an order, i.e., order-sensitive ranking based activity trajectory search (ORTS), which takes both the order of activities in a query q and the order of trajectories into account. It is challenging to answer RTS and ORTS efficiently due to the structural complexity of trajectory data with ranking information. In this paper, a hybrid index AC-tree and its optimized variant RAC-tree are proposed to achieve higher efficiency. Extensive experiments verify the high efficiency and scalability of the proposed algorithms.