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Routine Pattern Discovery and Anomaly Detection in Individual Travel Behavior

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Abstract

Discovering patterns and detecting anomalies in individual travel behavior is a crucial problem in both research and practice. In this paper, we address this problem by building a probabilistic framework to model individual spatiotemporal travel behavior data (e.g., trip records and trajectory data). We develop a two-dimensional latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to characterize the generative mechanism of spatiotemporal trip records of each traveler. This model introduces two separate factor matrices for the spatial dimension and the temporal dimension, respectively, and use a two-dimensional core structure at the individual level to effectively model the joint interactions and complex dependencies. This model can efficiently summarize travel behavior patterns on both spatial and temporal dimensions from very sparse trip sequences in an unsupervised way. In this way, complex travel behavior can be modeled as a mixture of representative and interpretable spatiotemporal patterns. By applying the trained model on future/unseen spatiotemporal records of a traveler, we can detect her behavior anomalies by scoring those observations using perplexity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling framework on a real-world license plate recognition (LPR) data set. The results confirm the advantage of statistical learning methods in modeling sparse individual travel behavior data. This type of pattern discovery and anomaly detection applications can provide useful insights for traffic monitoring, law enforcement, and individual travel behavior profiling.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Mitacs Canada, Canada Foundation for Innovation, and Fundway Technology Inc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0C3, Canada

    Lijun Sun & Luis F. Miranda-Moreno

  2. Department of Civil, Geological and Mining Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, H3T 1J4, Canada

    Xinyu Chen

  3. School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510006, China

    Zhaocheng He

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  1. Lijun Sun
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  2. Xinyu Chen
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  3. Zhaocheng He
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  4. Luis F. Miranda-Moreno
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Correspondence to Lijun Sun.

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Sun, L., Chen, X., He, Z. et al. Routine Pattern Discovery and Anomaly Detection in Individual Travel Behavior. Netw Spat Econ 23, 407–428 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-021-09542-9

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