A system for destination and future route prediction based on trajectory mining

Location is a key context ingredient and many existing pervasive applications rely on the current locations of their users. However, with the ability to predict the future location and movement behavior of a user, the usability of these applications can be greatly improved. In this paper, we propose an approach to predict both the intended destination and the future route of a person. Rather than predicting the destination and future route separately, we have focused on making prediction in an integrated way by exploiting personal movement data (i.e. trajectories) collected by GPS. Since trajectories contain daily whereabouts information of a person, the proposed approach first detects the significant places where the person may depart from or go to using a clustering-based algorithm called FBM (Forward Backward Matching), then abstracts the trajectories based on a space partitioning method, and finally extracts movement patterns from the abstracted trajectories using an extended CRPM (Continuous Route Pattern Mining) algorithm. Extracted movement patterns are organized in terms of origin-destination couples. The prediction is made based on a pattern tree built from these movement patterns. With the real personal movement data of 14 participants, we conducted a number of experiments to evaluate the performance of our system. The results show that our approach can achieve approximately 80% and 60% accuracy in destination prediction and 1-step prediction, respectively, and result in an average deviation of approximately 60 m in continuous future route prediction. Finally, based on the proposed approach, we implemented a prototype running on mobile phones, which can extract patterns from a user's historical movement data and predict the destination and future route. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.