Geo-SigSPM: mining geographically interesting and significant sequential patterns from trajectories

Interesting sequential patterns in human movement trajectories can provide valuable knowledge for urban management, planning, and location-based business. Existing methods for mining such patterns, however, tend not to consider the reduced likeliness of trips with increasing travel cost. Consequently, it is difficult to differentiate the patterns emerging from people’s specific travel interests from those simply due to travel convenience. To solve this problem, this article presents Geo-SigSPM for mining geographically interesting and statistically significant sequential patterns from trajectories. Here, ‘geographically interesting’ patterns are those more frequent than their expected frequencies which consider both the travel cost and non-redundancy of any place in the patterns. To achieve this, Geo-SigSPM formulates the expected frequencies of the patterns based on doubly-constrained human mobility models and the frequencies of their subsequences. A set of statistical tests is also developed to evaluate the identified interesting patterns. Experiments with synthetic and Foursquare check-in datasets demonstrate the efficacy of Geo-SigSPM in discovering geographically interesting patterns, controlling the spurious pattern rate, and discovering patterns that better reflect people’s specific travel interests than the conventional frequency-based pattern mining approach. Geo-SigSPM is a promising solution to improving relevant decision-making when people’s travel preference beyond travel cost is concerned.