Summarizing trajectories into k-primary corridors: A summary of results

Given a set of GPS trajectories on a road network, the goal of the k-Primary Corridors (k-PC) problem is to summarize trajectories into k groups, each represented by its most central trajectory. This problem is important to a variety of domains, such as transportation services interested in finding primary corridors for public transportation or greener travel (e.g., bicycling) by leveraging emerging GPS trajectory datasets. Related trajectory mining approaches, e.g., density or frequency based hot-routes, focus on anomaly detection rather than summarization and may not be effective for the k-PC problem. The k-PC problem is challenging due to the computational cost of creating the track similarity matrix. A naïve graph-based approach to compute a single element of this track similarity matrix requires multiple invocations of common shortest-path algorithms (e.g., Dijkstra). To reduce the computational cost of creating this track similarity matrix, we propose a novel algorithm that switches from a graph-based view to a matrix-based view, computing each element in the matrix with a single invocation of a shortest-path algorithm. Experimental results show that these ideas substantially reduce computational cost without altering the results.