A framework of mining semantic regions from trajectories

With the pervasive use of mobile devices with location sensing and positioning functions, such as Wi-Fi and GPS, people now are able to acquire present locations and collect their movement. As the availability of trajectory data prospers, mining activities hidden in raw trajectories becomes a hot research problem. Given a set of trajectories, prior works either explore density-based approaches to extract regions with high density of GPS data points or utilize time thresholds to identify users' stay points. However, users may have different activities along with trajectories. Prior works only can extract one kind of activity by specifying thresholds, such as spatial density or temporal time threshold. In this paper, we explore both spatial and temporal relationships among data points of trajectories to extract semantic regions that refer to regions in where users are likely to have some kinds of activities. In order to extract semantic regions, we propose a sequential clustering approach to discover clusters as the semantic regions from individual trajectory according to the spatial-temporal density. Based on semantic region discovery, we develop a shared nearest neighbor (SNN) based clustering algorithm to discover the frequent semantic region where the moving object often stay, which consists of a group of similar semantic regions from multiple trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate that our techniques are more accurate than existing clustering schemes.