Finding time period-based most frequent path in big trajectory data

The rise of GPS-equipped mobile devices has led to the emergence of big trajectory data. In this paper, we study a new path finding query which finds the most frequent path (MFP) during user-specified time periods in large-scale historical trajectory data. We refer to this query as time period-based MFP (TPMFP). Specifically, given a time period T, a source v_s and a destination v_d, TPMFP searches the MFP from v_s to v_d during T. Though there exist several proposals on defining MFP, they only consider a fixed time period. Most importantly, we find that none of them can well reflect people's common sense notion which can be described by three key properties, namely suffix-optimal (i.e., any suffix of an MFP is also an MFP), length-insensitive (i.e., MFP should not favor shorter or longer paths), and bottleneck-free (i.e., MFP should not contain infrequent edges). The TPMFP with the above properties will reveal not only common routing preferences of the past travelers, but also take the time effectiveness into consideration. Therefore, our first task is to give a TPMFP definition that satisfies the above three properties. Then, given the comprehensive TPMFP definition, our next task is to find TPMFP over huge amount of trajectory data efficiently. Particularly, we propose efficient search algorithms together with novel indexes to speed up the processing of TPMFP. To demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments using a real dataset containing over 11 million trajectories.