Effective and Efficient Representation Learning for Flight Trajectories

TL;DR

This paper introduces Flight2Vec, a novel flight-specific representation learning method that addresses key challenges in trajectory data, significantly enhancing performance across multiple downstream tasks like prediction, recognition, and anomaly detection.

Contribution

The paper proposes Flight2Vec, a unified trajectory representation learning approach that tackles unbalanced behavior density and 3D spatial continuity challenges, improving multiple flight analysis tasks.

Findings

Flight2Vec outperforms existing methods in trajectory prediction.

Enhanced accuracy in flight recognition and anomaly detection.

Unified representation benefits multiple downstream tasks.

Abstract

Flight trajectory data plays a vital role in the traffic management community, especially for downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction, flight recognition, and anomaly detection. Existing works often utilize handcrafted features and design models for different tasks individually, which heavily rely on domain expertise and are hard to extend. We argue that different flight analysis tasks share the same useful features of the trajectory. Jointly learning a unified representation for flight trajectories could be beneficial for improving the performance of various tasks. However, flight trajectory representation learning (TRL) faces two primary challenges, \ie unbalanced behavior density and 3D spatial continuity, which disable recent general TRL methods. In this paper, we propose Flight2Vec , a flight-specific representation learning method to address these challenges. Specifically, a behavior-adaptive patching mechanism is used to inspire the learned representation to pay more attention to behavior-dense segments. Moreover, we introduce a motion trend learning technique that guides the model to memorize not only the precise locations, but also the motion trend to generate better representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Flight2Vec significantly improves performance in downstream tasks such as flight trajectory prediction, flight recognition, and anomaly detection.