Discovery of stop regions for understanding repeat travel behaviors of moving objects

• Different from simplifying trajectories using turning points to keep their coarse shapes, this paper summarizes trajectories using stop points.
• We define a new concept of stay stability (i.e., reciprocal of speed) between any two GPS points to detect stop points on individual trajectories.
• We discover repeat travel behaviors by finding common sequences of stop regions where a certain number of objects visit with similar stop duration.
• The experiments on 20 labeled trajectories in Geolife demonstrated the semantic effect, accuracy and near linear efficiency of our method.

GPS trajectory dataset with high sampling-rates is usually in large volume that challenges the processing efficiency. Most of the data points on trajectories are useless. This paper summarizes trajectories using stop points. We define a new concept of stay stability (i.e., time dividing distance or reciprocal of speed) between any two GPS points to detect stop points on individual trajectories. We propose a novel Mining Repeat Travel Behaviors Using Stop Regions (MRTBUSR) method. In MRTBUSR, a stop region is a popular region containing a certain number of close stop points that can be grouped into a cluster. We then retrieve common sequences of stop regions to denote repeat route patterns and further analyze the stop durations on a stop region to find repeat travel behaviors. The experiments on 20 labeled trajectories selected from GeoLife demonstrated the semantic effect, accuracy and near linear efficiency of our proposed method.