Trajectory Similarity Analysis with the Weight of Direction and k-Neighborhood for AIS Data

Automatic Identification System (AIS) data have been widely used in many fields, such as collision detection, navigation, and maritime traffic management. Similarity analysis is an important process for most AIS trajectory analysis topics. However, most traditional AIS trajectory similarity analysis methods calculate the distance between trajectory points, which requires complex and time-consuming calculations, often leading to substantial errors when processing AIS trajectory data characterized by substantial differences in length or uneven trajectory points. Therefore, we propose a cell-based similarity analysis method that combines the weight of the direction and k-neighborhood (WDN-SIM). This method quantifies the similarity between trajectories based on the degree of proximity and differences in motion direction. In terms of its effectiveness and efficiency, WDN-SIM outperformed seven traditional methods for trajectory similarity analysis. Particularly, WDN-SIM has a high robustness to noise and can distinguish the similarities between trajectories under complex situations, such as when there are opposing directions of motion, large differences in length, and uneven point distributions.

HERMAS

Efficient representations for spatio-temporal cellular Signaling Data (SD) are essential for many human mobility applications. Traditional representation methods are mainly designed for GPS data with high spatio-temporal continuity, and thus will suffer from poor embedding performance due to the unique Ping Pong Effect in SD. To address this issue, we explore the opportunity offered by a large number of human mobility traces and mine the inherent neighboring tower connection patterns. More specifically, we design HERMAS, a novel representation learning framework for large-scale cellular SD with three steps: (1) extract rich context information in each trajectory, adding neighboring tower information as extra knowledge in each mobility observation; (2) design a sequence encoding model to aggregate the embedding of each observation; (3) obtain the embedding for a trajectory. We evaluate the performance of HERMAS based on two human mobility applications, i.e. trajectory similarity measurement and user profiling. We conduct evaluations based on a 30-day SD dataset with 130,612 users and 2,369,267 moving trajectories. Experimental results show that (1) for the trajectory similarity measurement application, HERMAS improves the Hitting Rate (HR@10) from 15.2% to 39.2%; (2) for the user profiling application, HERMAS improves the F1-score for around 9%. More importantly, HERMAS significantly improves the computation efficiency by over 30x.