A methodology with a distributed algorithm for large-scale trajectory distribution prediction

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose a method for predicting the distributions of people’s trajectories on the road network throughout a city. Specifically, we predict the number of people who will move from one area to another, their probable trajectories, and the corresponding likelihoods of those trajectories in the near future, such as within an hour. With this prediction, we will identify the hot road segments where potential traffic jams might occur and reveal the formation of those traffic jams. Accurate predictions of human trajectories at a city level in real time is challenging due to the uncertainty of people’s spatial and temporal mobility patterns, the complexity of a city level’s road network, and the scale of the data. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a method which includes several major components: (1) a model for predicting movements between neighboring areas, which combines both latent and explicit features that may influence the movements; (2) different methods to estimate corresponding flow trajectory distributions in the road network; (3) a MapReduce-based distributed algorithm to simulate large-scale trajectory distributions under real-time constraints. We conducted two case studies with taxi data collected from Beijing and New York City and systematically evaluated our method.

KEYWORDS:

• Trajectory distribution
• big data
• spatial-temporal prediction
• distributed algorithm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

QiuLei Guo

Qiulei Guo received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Computing and Information Science, University of Pittsburgh. His primary research interest include spatial-temporal data mining, distributed computing, and location-based services etc. Previously he got the B.S and M.S degrees from South China University of Technology, both major in computer science.

Hassan A. Karimi

Hassan A. Karimi is a Professor and Director of the Geoinformatics Laboratory in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include Big Data, grid/distributed/parallel computing, navigation, location-based services, location-aware social networking, geospatial information systems, mobile computing, computational geometry, and spatial databases.