LAUSR

ABSTRACT Large collections of trajectories provide rich insight into movement patterns of the tracked objects. By map matching trajectories to a road network as sequences of road edge IDs, contiguous sequential patterns can be extracted as a certain number of objects traversing a specific path, which provides valuable information in travel demand modeling and transportation planning. Mining and visualization of such patterns still face challenges in efficiency, scalability, and visual cluttering of patterns. To address these challenges, this article firstly proposes a Bidirectional Pruning based Closed Contiguous Sequential pattern Mining (BP-CCSM) algorithm. By employing tree structures to create partitions of input sequences and candidate patterns, closeness can be checked efficiently by comparing nodes in a tree. Secondly, a system called Sequential Pattern Explorer for Trajectories (SPET) is built for spatial and temporal exploration of the mined patterns. Two types of maps are designed where a conventional traffic map gives an overview of the movement patterns and a dynamic offset map presents detailed information according to user-specified filters. Extensive experiments are performed in this article. BP-CCSM is compared with three other state-of-the-art algorithms on two datasets: a small public dataset containing clickstreams from an e-commerce and a large global positioning system dataset with more than 600,000 taxi trip trajectories. The results show that BP-CCSM considerably outperforms three other algorithms in terms of running time and memory consumption. Besides, SPET provides an efficient and convenient way to inspect spatial and temporal variations in closed contiguous sequential patterns from a large number of trajectories.