Estimator: An Effective and Scalable Framework for Transportation Mode Classification over Trajectories

TL;DR

The paper introduces Estimator, a CNN-TCN based framework that effectively and scalably classifies transportation modes from GPS trajectories, outperforming existing methods in accuracy, speed, and scalability.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel CNN-TCN architecture and a spatial partitioning strategy that significantly improve transportation mode classification in terms of effectiveness and scalability.

Findings

Achieves 99% accuracy and 0.98 F1-score, surpassing state-of-the-art methods.

Provides 7-40x speedup over existing learning-based approaches.

Demonstrates high scalability and robustness for large-scale trajectory classification.

Abstract

Transportation mode classification, the process of predicting the class labels of moving objects transportation modes, has been widely applied to a variety of real world applications, such as traffic management, urban computing, and behavior study. However, existing studies of transportation mode classification typically extract the explicit features of trajectory data but fail to capture the implicit features that affect the classification performance. In addition, most of the existing studies also prefer to apply RNN-based models to embed trajectories, which is only suitable for classifying small-scale data. To tackle the above challenges, we propose an effective and scalable framework for transportation mode classification over GPS trajectories, abbreviated Estimator. Estimator is established on a developed CNN-TCN architecture, which is capable of leveraging the spatial and temporal hidden features of trajectories to achieve high effectiveness and efficiency. Estimator partitions the entire traffic space into disjointed spatial regions according to traffic conditions, which enhances the scalability significantly and thus enables parallel transportation classification. Extensive experiments using eight public real-life datasets offer evidence that Estimator i) achieves superior model effectiveness (i.e., 99% Accuracy and 0.98 F1-score), which outperforms state-of-the-arts substantially; ii) exhibits prominent model efficiency, and obtains 7-40x speedups up over state-of-the-arts learning-based methods; and iii) shows high model scalability and robustness that enables large-scale classification analytics.