An effective and versatile distance measure for spatiotemporal trajectories

摘要

The analysis of large-scale trajectory data has tremendous benefits for applications ranging from transportation planning to traffic management. A fundamental building block for the analysis of such data is the computation of similarity between trajectories. Existing work for similarity computation focuses mainly on the spatial aspects of trajectories, but more rarely takes into account time in conjunction with space. A key challenge when considering time is how to handle trajectories that are sampled asynchronously or at variable rates, which can lead to uncertainty. To tackle this problem, we quantify trajectory similarity as an interval, rather than a single value, to capture the uncertainty that can result from different sampling rates and asynchronous sampling. Based on this perspective, we develop a new trajectory similarity measure, Trajectory Interval Distance Estimation, which models similarity computation as a convex optimisation problem. Using two real datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed measure is extremely effective for assessing similarity in comparison to existing state of the art measures.