Pace-Based Clustering of GPS Data for Inferring Visit Locations and Durations on a Trip

Abstract

Travel recommendation and travel diary generation applications can benefit significantly from methods that infer the durations and locations of visits from travelers' GPS data. However, conventional inference methods, which cluster GPS points on the basis of their spatial distance, are not suited to inferring visit durations. This paper presents a pace-based clustering method to infer visit locations and durations. The method contributes two novel techniques: (1) It clusters GPS points logged during visits by considering the speed and applying a probabilistic density function for each trip. Consequently, it avoids clustering GPS points that are near but unrelated to visits. (2) It also includes additional GPS points in the clusters by considering their temporal sequence. As a result, it is able to complete the clusters with GPS points that are far from the visits but are logged during the visits, caused, for example, by GPS noise indoors. The results of an experimental evaluation comparing our proposed method with three published inference methods indicate that our proposed method infers the duration of a visit with an average error rate of 8.7%, notably outperforming the other methods.