LSI-LSTM: An attention-aware LSTM for real-time driving destination prediction by considering location semantics and location importance of trajectory points

Abstract Individual driving final destination prediction supports location-based services such as personalized service recommendations, traffic navigation, and public transport dispatching. However, real-time destination prediction is challenging due to the complexity of temporal dependencies, and the strong influence of travel spatiotemporal semantics and spatial correlations. Besides temporal context, the nearby urban functionalities of traveling zones and departure regions, and the crucial positions on the road network where trajectory points located would reflect the travel intentions of drivers. However, these spatial factors are rarely considered in existing studies. To fill this gap, we propose a real-time individual driving destination prediction model LSI-LSTM based on an attention-aware Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) by taking Location Semantics and Location Importance of trajectory points into account. More specifically, a trajectory location semantics extraction method (t-LSE) enriches feature description with prior knowledge for implicit travel intentions learning. t-LSE represents urban functionality through Points of Interest (POIs) using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). Meanwhile, a novel trajectory spatial attention mechanism (t-SAM) captures the trajectory points that strongly correlate to candidate destinations based on the location importance inferred from the driving status, i.e., turning angle, driving speed, and traveled distance. Comparative experiments with three baseline methods, i.e., Hidden Markov Model, Random Forest, and LSTM, demonstrate significant prediction accuracy improvements of LSI-LSTM on four individual trajectory datasets. Further analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed semantic extraction method and attention mechanism, and also discuss the factors that may affect the prediction results.