From taxi GPS traces to social and community dynamics

Vehicles equipped with GPS localizers are an important sensory device for examining people’s movements and activities. Taxis equipped with GPS localizers serve the transportation needs of a large number of people driven by diverse needs; their traces can tell us where passengers were picked up and dropped off, which route was taken, and what steps the driver took to find a new passenger. In this article, we provide an exhaustive survey of the work on mining these traces. We first provide a formalization of the data sets, along with an overview of different mechanisms for preprocessing the data. We then classify the existing work into three main categories: social dynamics, traffic dynamics and operational dynamics. Social dynamics refers to the study of the collective behaviour of a city’s population, based on their observed movements; Traffic dynamics studies the resulting flow of the movement through the road network; Operational dynamics refers to the study and analysis of taxi driver’s modus operandi. We discuss the different problems currently being researched, the various approaches proposed, and suggest new avenues of research. Finally, we present a historical overview of the research work in this field and discuss which areas hold most promise for future research.

[1]  George E. P. Box,et al.  Time Series Analysis: Box/Time Series Analysis , 2008 .

[2]  Anind K. Dey,et al.  Navigate like a cabbie: probabilistic reasoning from observed context-aware behavior , 2008, UbiComp.

[3]  Mirco Musolesi,et al.  Sensing meets mobile social networks: the design, implementation and evaluation of the CenceMe application , 2008, SenSys '08.

[4]  Bernhard Schölkopf,et al.  Learning with kernels , 2001 .

[5]  Nuno,et al.  Exploratory Study of Urban Flow using Taxi Traces , 2011 .

[6]  Nicholas Jing Yuan,et al.  T-Finder: A Recommender System for Finding Passengers and Vacant Taxis , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[7]  Nuria Oliver,et al.  Sensing and predicting the pulse of the city through shared bicycling , 2009, IJCAI 2009.

[8]  G. Cox,et al.  ~ " " " ' l I ~ " " -" . : -· " J , 2006 .

[9]  Guangzhong Sun,et al.  Driving with knowledge from the physical world , 2011, KDD.

[10]  Sanjay Chawla,et al.  On Mining Anomalous Patterns in Road Traffic Streams , 2011, ADMA.

[11]  S.S. Chawathe,et al.  Segment-Based Map Matching , 2007, 2007 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.

[12]  Ouri Wolfson,et al.  A weight-based map matching method in moving objects databases , 2004, Proceedings. 16th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, 2004..

[13]  Astrid Gühnemann,et al.  MONITORING TRAFFIC AND EMISSIONS BY FLOATING CAR DATA , 2004 .

[14]  John Krumm,et al.  Route Prediction from Trip Observations , 2008 .

[15]  G. Madey,et al.  Uncovering individual and collective human dynamics from mobile phone records , 2007, 0710.2939.

[16]  Ricardo Fernandes,et al.  Empirical evaluation of a dynamic and distributed taxi-sharing system , 2012, 2012 15th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[17]  Peter Wagner,et al.  A TRAFFIC INFORMATION SYSTEM BY MEANS OF REAL-TIME FLOATING-CAR DATA , 2002 .

[18]  Qingquan Li,et al.  Path-finding through flexible hierarchical road networks: An experiential approach using taxi trajectory data , 2011, Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinformation.

[19]  Shigeo Abe DrEng.  Pattern Classification , 2001, Springer London.

[20]  Daqing Zhang,et al.  Measuring social functions of city regions from large-scale taxi behaviors , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops).

[21]  Chaoming Song,et al.  Modelling the scaling properties of human mobility , 2010, 1010.0436.

[22]  Minglu Li,et al.  Road recognition using coarse-grained vehicular traces , 2012 .

[23]  Jie Cao,et al.  Pick-Up Tree Based Route Recommendation from Taxi Trajectories , 2012, WAIM.

[24]  Yuan Tian,et al.  Understanding intra-urban trip patterns from taxi trajectory data , 2012, J. Geogr. Syst..

[25]  Xing Xie,et al.  Where to find my next passenger , 2011, UbiComp '11.

[26]  Xiao Liang,et al.  Where to wait for a taxi? , 2012, UrbComp '12.

[27]  Vania Bogorny,et al.  A model for enriching trajectories with semantic geographical information , 2007, GIS.

[28]  Jon Louis Bentley,et al.  Quad trees a data structure for retrieval on composite keys , 1974, Acta Informatica.

[29]  Patrick Weber,et al.  OpenStreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps , 2008, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[30]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Reality mining: sensing complex social systems , 2006, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[31]  K. Cooke,et al.  The shortest route through a network with time-dependent internodal transit times , 1966 .

[32]  Xing Xie,et al.  Urban computing with taxicabs , 2011, UbiComp '11.

[33]  Guanling Chen,et al.  Multi-layered friendship modeling for location-based Mobile Social Networks , 2009, 2009 6th Annual International Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking & Services, MobiQuitous.

[34]  Jae-Gil Lee,et al.  Temporal Outlier Detection in Vehicle Traffic Data , 2009, 2009 IEEE 25th International Conference on Data Engineering.

[35]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Incremental Learning with Accuracy Prediction of Social and Individual Properties from Mobile-Phone Data , 2011, 2012 International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2012 International Confernece on Social Computing.

[36]  Pietro Liò,et al.  Collective Human Mobility Pattern from Taxi Trips in Urban Area , 2012, PloS one.

[37]  Gang Pan,et al.  Mining the semantics of origin-destination flows using taxi traces , 2012, UbiComp '12.

[38]  Xing Xie,et al.  T-drive: driving directions based on taxi trajectories , 2010, GIS '10.

[39]  Chengyang Zhang,et al.  Map-matching for low-sampling-rate GPS trajectories , 2009, GIS.

[40]  Aron Culotta,et al.  Towards detecting influenza epidemics by analyzing Twitter messages , 2010, SOMA '10.

[41]  Gyung-Leen Park,et al.  Analysis of the Passenger Pick-Up Pattern for Taxi Location Recommendation , 2008, 2008 Fourth International Conference on Networked Computing and Advanced Information Management.

[42]  Zhaohui Wu,et al.  Prediction of urban human mobility using large-scale taxi traces and its applications , 2012, Frontiers of Computer Science.

[43]  Chi-Chung Tao,et al.  Dynamic Taxi-Sharing Service Using Intelligent Transportation System Technologies , 2007, 2007 International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing.

[44]  Qingquan Li,et al.  Mining time-dependent attractive areas and movement patterns from taxi trajectory data , 2009, 2009 17th International Conference on Geoinformatics.

[45]  Bin Jiang,et al.  Characterizing the human mobility pattern in a large street network. , 2009, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[46]  Yu-chin Tai,et al.  iTaxi : Context-Aware Taxi Demand Hotspots Prediction Using Ontology and Data Mining Approaches , 2010 .

[47]  Henry A. Kautz,et al.  Inferring High-Level Behavior from Low-Level Sensors , 2003, UbiComp.

[48]  Rui Xu,et al.  Survey of clustering algorithms , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.

[49]  Lin Sun,et al.  Real-Time Detection of Anomalous Taxi Trajectories from GPS Traces , 2011, MobiQuitous.

[50]  Wei Zhang,et al.  Urban Traffic Situation Calculation Methods Based on Probe Vehicle Data , 2007 .

[51]  Xu Li,et al.  META: A Mobility Model of MEtropolitan TAxis Extracted from GPS Traces , 2010, 2010 IEEE Wireless Communication and Networking Conference.

[52]  Ziqi Liao,et al.  Real-time taxi dispatching using Global Positioning Systems , 2003, CACM.

[53]  David Lazer,et al.  Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[54]  J. Greenfeld.  MATCHING GPS OBSERVATIONS TO LOCATIONS ON A DIGITAL MAP , 2002 .

[55]  Daqing Zhang,et al.  Urban Traffic Modelling and Prediction Using Large Scale Taxi GPS Traces , 2012, Pervasive.

[56]  Murat Ali Bayir,et al.  Crowd-sourced sensing and collaboration using twitter , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Symposium on "A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks" (WoWMoM).

[57]  Wenquan Li,et al.  Research on Optimization of Vehicle Routing Problem for Ride-sharing Taxi , 2012 .

[58]  Daniel Gatica-Perez,et al.  Discovering routines from large-scale human locations using probabilistic topic models , 2011, TIST.

[59]  Xing Xie,et al.  T-Drive: Enhancing Driving Directions with Taxi Drivers' Intelligence , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[60]  Dino Pedreschi,et al.  Unveiling the complexity of human mobility by querying and mining massive trajectory data , 2011, The VLDB Journal.

[61]  James Biagioni,et al.  Inferring Road Maps from GPS Traces: Survey and Comparative Evaluation , 2012 .

[62]  Xiaogang Jin,et al.  Study on spatial and temporal mobility pattern of urban taxi services , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering.

[63]  Nicholas Jing Yuan,et al.  Segmentation of Urban Areas Using Road Networks , 2012 .

[64]  Xing Xie,et al.  A greener transportation mode: flexible routes discovery from GPS trajectory data , 2011, GIS.

[65]  Dieter Pfoser,et al.  On Map-Matching Vehicle Tracking Data , 2005, VLDB.

[66]  James Biagioni,et al.  Inferring Road Maps from Global Positioning System Traces , 2012 .

[67]  Christopher Wilson,et al.  Mining GPS data to augment road models , 1999, KDD '99.

[68]  Chun Zhang,et al.  Storing and querying ordered XML using a relational database system , 2002, SIGMOD '02.

[69]  Y. Murata,et al.  Waiting / cruising location recommendation for efficient taxi business , .

[70]  Siyuan Liu,et al.  Towards mobility-based clustering , 2010, KDD.

[71]  U. Rieder,et al.  Markov Decision Processes , 2010 .

[72]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  The Geography of Taste: Analyzing Cell-Phone Mobility and Social Events , 2010, Pervasive.

[73]  David G. Stork,et al.  Pattern Classification , 1973 .

[74]  Yu Zheng,et al.  T-share: A large-scale dynamic taxi ridesharing service , 2013, 2013 IEEE 29th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE).

[75]  Yang Du,et al.  Finding Fastest Paths on A Road Network with Speed Patterns , 2006, 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'06).

[76]  Pietro Liò,et al.  Correction: Collective Human Mobility Pattern from Taxi Trips in Urban Area , 2012, PLoS ONE.

[77]  Dino Pedreschi,et al.  Trajectory pattern mining , 2007, KDD '07.

[78]  Dan Cosley,et al.  Inferring social ties from geographic coincidences , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[79]  Wen-Tsuen Chen,et al.  A Fuel-Saving and Pollution-Reducing Dynamic Taxi-Sharing Protocol in VANETs , 2010, 2010 IEEE 72nd Vehicular Technology Conference - Fall.

[80]  Liang Liu,et al.  Uncovering cabdrivers' behavior patterns from their digital traces , 2010, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[81]  Alexandre M. Bayen,et al.  Kernel regression for travel time estimation via convex optimization , 2009, Proceedings of the 48h IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) held jointly with 2009 28th Chinese Control Conference.

[82]  Qingquan Li,et al.  Hierarchical route planning based on taxi GPS-trajectories , 2009, 2009 17th International Conference on Geoinformatics.

[83]  Zhi-Hua Zhou,et al.  B-Planner: Night bus route planning using large-scale taxi GPS traces , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).

[84]  Stewart Worrall.  Automated Process for Generating Digitised Maps through GPS Data Compression , 2007 .

[85]  Lars Backstrom,et al.  Find me if you can: improving geographical prediction with social and spatial proximity , 2010, WWW '10.

[86]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Taxi-Aware Map: Identifying and Predicting Vacant Taxis in the City , 2010, AmI.

[87]  Alexander J. Smola,et al.  Learning with kernels , 1998 .

[88]  Hui Xiong,et al.  A Taxi Driving Fraud Detection System , 2011, 2011 IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining.

[89]  Johan Bollen,et al.  Modeling Public Mood and Emotion: Twitter Sentiment and Socio-Economic Phenomena , 2009, ICWSM.

[90]  Jeffrey Xu Yu,et al.  Finding time-dependent shortest paths over large graphs , 2008, EDBT '08.

[91]  Jinbo Bi,et al.  Dimensionality Reduction via Sparse Support Vector Machines , 2003, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[92]  Yi-Chang Chiu,et al.  Modeling Routing Behavior for Vacant Taxicabs in Urban Traffic Networks , 2012 .

[93]  Heng Tao Shen,et al.  Principal Component Analysis , 2009, Encyclopedia of Biometrics.

[94]  Daqing Zhang,et al.  The Emergence of Social and Community Intelligence , 2011, Computer.

[95]  Ruth F. Curtain,et al.  Proceedings of the 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2009, combined withe the 28th Chinese Control Conference, December 16-18, 2009, Shanghai, China , 2009, CDC.

[96]  Hervé Jégou,et al.  A Group Testing Framework for Similarity Search in High-dimensional Spaces , 2014, ACM Multimedia.

[97]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Predestination: Inferring Destinations from Partial Trajectories , 2006, UbiComp.

[98]  Paolo Frasconi,et al.  Collective Traffic Forecasting , 2010, ECML/PKDD.

[99]  Kentaro Uesugi,et al.  Adaptive Routing of Cruising Taxis by Mutual Exchange of Pathways , 2008, KES.

[100]  Alexandre M. Bayen,et al.  Estimating arterial traffic conditions using sparse probe data , 2010, 13th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[101]  Shu Yu,et al.  Hybrid GA Based Online Support Vector Machine Model for Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting , 2007, APPT.

[102]  Andrew Y. Ng,et al.  Pharmacokinetics of a novel formulation of ivermectin after administration to goats , 2000, ICML.

[103]  Xing Xie,et al.  An Interactive-Voting Based Map Matching Algorithm , 2010, 2010 Eleventh International Conference on Mobile Data Management.

[104]  Hari Balakrishnan,et al.  Stochastic Motion Planning and Applications to Traffic , 2008, WAFR.

[105]  Lin Sun,et al.  Hunting or waiting? Discovering passenger-finding strategies from a large-scale real-world taxi dataset , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops).

[106]  Qingquan Li,et al.  Visualizing hot spot analysis result based on mashup , 2009, LBSN '09.

[107]  Henry Fuchs,et al.  On visible surface generation by a priori tree structures , 1980, SIGGRAPH '80.

[108]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Understanding individual human mobility patterns , 2008, Nature.

[109]  Favyen Bastani,et al.  Towards Reducing Taxicab Cruising Time Using Spatio-Temporal Profitability Maps , 2011, SSTD.

[110]  Zhi-Hua Zhou,et al.  iBAT: detecting anomalous taxi trajectories from GPS traces , 2011, UbiComp '11.

[111]  ChenChao,et al.  From taxi GPS traces to social and community dynamics , 2013 .

[112]  Thad Starner,et al.  Using GPS to learn significant locations and predict movement across multiple users , 2003, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[113]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility , 2010, Science.

[114]  John Krumm,et al.  From GPS traces to a routable road map , 2009, GIS.

[115]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Mobile Landscapes: Using Location Data from Cell Phones for Urban Analysis , 2006 .

[116]  Peter Sanders,et al.  Highway Hierarchies Hasten Exact Shortest Path Queries , 2005, ESA.

[117]  John Krumm,et al.  Probabilistic modeling of traffic lanes from GPS traces , 2010, GIS '10.

[118]  Rajesh Krishna Balan,et al.  Real-time trip information service for a large taxi fleet , 2011, MobiSys '11.

[119]  Fahui Wang,et al.  Urban land uses and traffic 'source-sink areas': Evidence from GPS-enabled taxi data in Shanghai , 2012 .

[120]  Stefan Edelkamp,et al.  Route Planning and Map Inference with Global Positioning Traces , 2003, Computer Science in Perspective.

[121]  Antonin Guttman,et al.  R-trees: a dynamic index structure for spatial searching , 1984, SIGMOD '84.

[122]  Sanjay Chawla,et al.  Inferring the Root Cause in Road Traffic Anomalies , 2012, 2012 IEEE 12th International Conference on Data Mining.

[123]  S. Phithakkitnukoon,et al.  Urban mobility study using taxi traces , 2011, TDMA '11.

[124]  John Krumm,et al.  Detecting Road Intersections from GPS Traces , 2010, GIScience.

[125]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Social fMRI: Investigating and shaping social mechanisms in the real world , 2011, Pervasive Mob. Comput..

[126]  Yizhou Yu,et al.  Anomaly detection in GPS data based on visual analytics , 2010, 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology.

[127]  Yanmin Zhu,et al.  Challenges and Opportunities in Exploiting Large-Scale GPS Probe Data , 2011 .

[128]  Minglu Li,et al.  A practical map-matching algorithm for GPS-based vehicular networks in Shanghai urban area , 2007 .

[129]  Henry A. Kautz,et al.  Learning and inferring transportation routines , 2004, Artif. Intell..

[130]  I. Jolliffe.  Principal Component Analysis , 2002 .

[131]  Jifu Guo,et al.  Operational Analysis on Beijing Road Network during the Olympic Games , 2008 .

[132]  共立出版株式会社.  コンピュータ・サイエンス : ACM computing surveys , 1978 .

[133]  Xing Xie,et al.  Learning transportation mode from raw gps data for geographic applications on the web , 2008, WWW.

[134]  Gang Chen,et al.  Mining Frequent Trajectory Patterns from GPS Tracks , 2010, 2010 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering.

[135]  Matthew Brand,et al.  Coupled hidden Markov models for modeling interacting processes , 1997 .

[136]  Jiawei Han,et al.  Adaptive Fastest Path Computation on a Road Network: A Traffic Mining Approach , 2007, VLDB.

[137]  Anna Monreale,et al.  WhereNext: a location predictor on trajectory pattern mining , 2009, KDD.

[138]  Lin Sun,et al.  Real Time Anomalous Trajectory Detection and Analysis , 2012, Mobile Networks and Applications.

[139]  Xing Xie,et al.  Destination prediction by sub-trajectory synthesis and privacy protection against such prediction , 2013, 2013 IEEE 29th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE).

[140]  Xing Xie,et al.  GeoLife: A Collaborative Social Networking Service among User, Location and Trajectory , 2010, IEEE Data Eng. Bull..

[141]  Milos Hauskrecht,et al.  Approximation Strategies for Routing in Stochastic Dynamic Networks , 2008, ISAIM.

[142]  David R. Cox,et al.  Time Series Analysis , 2012 .

[143]  S. Chiba,et al.  Dynamic programming algorithm optimization for spoken word recognition , 1978 .

[144]  Minglu Li,et al.  Smart recommendation by mining large-scale GPS traces , 2012, 2012 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).

[145]  Milos Hauskrecht,et al.  Modeling Highway Traffic Volumes , 2007, ECML.

[146]  Jane Yung-jen Hsu,et al.  Context-aware taxi demand hotspots prediction , 2010, Int. J. Bus. Intell. Data Min..

[147]  Xing Xie,et al.  Mining interesting locations and travel sequences from GPS trajectories , 2009, WWW '09.

[148]  Vania Bogorny,et al.  A clustering-based approach for discovering interesting places in trajectories , 2008, SAC '08.

[149]  S. Bekhor,et al.  Evaluating long‐distance travel patterns in Israel by tracking cellular phone positions , 2013 .

[150]  Daniel Gatica-Perez,et al.  What did you do today?: discovering daily routines from large-scale mobile data , 2008, ACM Multimedia.

[151]  Santi Phithakkitnukoon,et al.  Sensing urban mobility with taxi flow , 2011, LBSN '11.

[152]  F. Downton,et al.  Time-Series Analysis. , 1961 .

[153]  Martin L. Puterman,et al.  Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming , 1994 .

[154]  Hui Xiong,et al.  An energy-efficient mobile recommender system , 2010, KDD.

[155]  Xing Xie,et al.  Discovering spatio-temporal causal interactions in traffic data streams , 2011, KDD.

[156]  Günter Rote,et al.  Matching planar maps , 2003, SODA '03.

[157]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Eigenplaces: Segmenting Space through Digital Signatures , 2010, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[158]  Jonathan D. Cryer,et al.  Time Series Analysis , 1986, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[159]  Carlo Ratti,et al.  Revealing Taxi Driver's Mobility Intelligence through His Trace , 2010 .

[160]  Christopher Wilson,et al.  Mining GPS Traces for Map Refinement , 2004, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.

[161]  Xing Xie,et al.  Discovering regions of different functions in a city using human mobility and POIs , 2012, KDD.

[162]  Jinxing Hu,et al.  Dynamic modeling of urban population travel behavior based on data fusion of mobile phone positioning data and FCD , 2009, 2009 17th International Conference on Geoinformatics.