Semi-Supervised Deep Learning Approach for Transportation Mode Identification Using GPS Trajectory Data

Identification of travelers’ transportation modes is a fundamental step for various problems that arise in the domain of transportation such as travel demand analysis, transport planning, and traffic management. In this paper, we aim to identify travelers’ transportation modes purely based on their GPS trajectories. First, a segmentation process is developed to partition a user's trip into GPS segments with only one transportation mode. A majority of studies have proposed mode inference models based on hand-crafted features, which might be vulnerable to traffic and environmental conditions. Furthermore, the classification task in almost all models have been performed in a supervised fashion while a large amount of unlabeled GPS trajectories has remained unused. Accordingly, we propose a deep SEmi-Supervised Convolutional Autoencoder (SECA) architecture that can not only automatically extract relevant features from GPS segments but also exploit useful information in unlabeled data. The SECA integrates a convolutional-deconvolutional autoencoder and a convolutional neural network into a unified framework to concurrently perform supervised and unsupervised learning. The two components are simultaneously trained using both labeled and unlabeled GPS segments, which have already been converted into an efficient representation for the convolutional operation. An optimum schedule for varying the balancing parameters between reconstruction and classification errors are also implemented. The performance of the proposed SECA model, trip segmentation, the method for converting a raw trajectory into a new representation, the hyperparameter schedule, and the model configuration are evaluated by comparing to several baselines and alternatives for various amounts of labeled and unlabeled data. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art semi-supervised and supervised methods with respect to metrics such as accuracy and F-measure.