Trajectory clustering via deep representation learning

Abstract

Trajectory clustering, which aims at discovering groups of similar trajectories, has long been considered as a corner stone task for revealing movement patterns as well as facilitating higher-level applications like location prediction. While a plethora of trajectory clustering techniques have been proposed, they often rely on spatiotemporal similarity measures that are not space- and time-invariant. As a result, they cannot detect trajectory clusters where the within-cluster similarity occurs in different regions and time periods. In this paper, we revisit the trajectory clustering problem by learning quality low-dimensional representations of the trajectories. We first use a sliding window to extract a set of moving behavior features that capture space- and time-invariant characteristics of the trajectories. With the feature extraction module, we transform each trajectory into a feature sequence to describe object movements, and further employ a sequence to sequence autoencoder to learn fixed-length deep representations. The learnt representations robustly encode the movement characteristics of the objects and thus lead to space- and time-invariant clusters. We evaluate the proposed method on both synthetic and real data, and observe significant performance improvements over existing methods.