A Novel Approach for Mining Time and Space Proximity-based Frequent Sequential Patterns from Trajectory Data

Trajectory Data have been considered as a treasure for various hidden patterns which provide deeper understanding of the underlying moving objects. Several studies are focused to extract repetitive, frequent and group patterns. Conventional algorithms defined for Sequential Patterns Mining problems are not directly applicable for trajectory data. Space Partitioning strategies were proposed to capture space proximity first and then time proximity to discover the knowledge in the data. Our proposal addresses time proximity first by identifying trajectories which meet at a minimum of K time stamps in sequence. A novel tree structure is proposed to ease the process. Our method investigates space proximity using Mahalanobis distance (MD). We have used the Manhattan distance to form prior knowledge that helps the supervised learning-based MD to derive the clusters of trajectories along the true spreads of the objects. With the help of minsup threshold, clusters of frequent trajectories are found and then in sequence they form K length Sequential Patterns. Illustrative examples are provided to compare the MD metric with Euclidean distance metric, Synthetic dataset is generated and results are presented considering the various parameters such as number of objects, minsup, K value, number of hops in any trajectory and computational time. Experiments are done on available real-time dataset, taxi dataset, too. Sequential Patterns are proved to be worthy of knowledge to understand dynamics of the moving objects and to recommend the movements in constrained networks.