Travel Mode Identification With GPS Trajectories Using Wavelet Transform and Deep Learning

Abstract

Accurate identification in public travel modes is an essential task in intelligent transportation systems. In recent years, GPS-based identification is gradually replacing the conventional survey-based information-gathering process due to the more detailed and precise data on individual’s travel patterns. Nonetheless, existing research suffers from deficient feature selection, high data dimensionality, and data under-utilization issues. In this work, we propose a novel travel mode identification mechanism based on discrete wavelet transform and recent developments of deep learning techniques. The proposed mechanism aims to take GPS trajectories of arbitrary lengths to develop accurate travel mode results in both global and online identification scenarios. In this mechanism, raw GPS data is first pre-processed to compute preliminary motion and displacement attributes, which are input into a tailor-made deep neural network. Discrete wavelet transform is also adopted to further extract time-frequency domain characteristics of the trajectories to assist the neural network in the classification task. To evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism, a series of comprehensive case studies are conducted. The results indicate that the mechanism can notably outperform existing travel mode identifications on a same data set with minuscule computation time. Furthermore, an architecture test is performed to determine the best-performing structure for the proposed mechanism. Lastly, we demonstrate the capability of the mechanism in handling online identifications, and the performance sensitivity of the selected attributes is evaluated.