Determining user specific semantics of locations extracted from trajectory data

Abstract

Knowledge about people's daily travel behavior is very relevant for transportation planning, but also for urban and regional planning in general. This information is typically collected through questionnaires or surveys. With the increasing availability of mobile devices capable of using Global Navigation Satellite Systems, it is possible to derive individual mobility behavior on a large scale and for a variety of different users. However, the challenge is to derive the relevant information from the mere GNSS trajectories; in this paper, the relevant information is semantic locations such as home, work place or leisure places. This paper presents an approach to first detect and cluster stop points as potential semantic locations of a user, which are then enriched with Points of Interest from OpenStreetMap and additional features, and finally a Viterbi optimization assigns the most probable semantics to these locations. Overall, this approach produces promising results for predicting user location semantics on a generalized level.