Title
Unveiling the complexity of human mobility by querying and mining massive trajectory data
Abstract
The technologies of mobile communications pervade our society and wireless networks sense the movement of people, generating large volumes of mobility data, such as mobile phone call records and Global Positioning System (GPS) tracks. In this work, we illustrate the striking analytical power of massive collections of trajectory data in unveiling the complexity of human mobility. We present the results of a large-scale experiment, based on the detailed trajectories of tens of thousands private cars with on-board GPS receivers, tracked during weeks of ordinary mobile activity. We illustrate the knowledge discovery process that, based on these data, addresses some fundamental questions of mobility analysts: what are the frequent patterns of people's travels? How big attractors and extraordinary events influence mobility? How to predict areas of dense traffic in the near future? How to characterize traffic jams and congestions? We also describe M-Atlas, the querying and mining language and system that makes this analytical process possible, providing the mechanisms to master the complexity of transforming raw GPS tracks into mobility knowledge. M-Atlas is centered onto the concept of a trajectory, and the mobility knowledge discovery process can be specified by M-Atlas queries that realize data transformations, data-driven estimation of the parameters of the mining methods, the quality assessment of the obtained results, the quantitative and visual exploration of the discovered behavioral patterns and models, the composition of mined patterns, models and data with further analyses and mining, and the incremental mining strategies to address scalability.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1007/s00778-011-0244-8
VLDB J.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Spatio-temporal data mining,Trajectories,Mobility patterns,Movement analysis
Data science,Data mining,Behavioral pattern,Data stream mining,Computer science,Mobility model,Global Positioning System,Knowledge extraction,Mobile phone,Mobile telephony,Database,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
20
5
1066-8888
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
131
5.70
32
Authors
7
Search Limit
100131
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fosca Giannotti12948253.39
Mirco Nanni2141284.47
Dino Pedreschi33083244.47
Fabio Pinelli497250.96
Chiara Renso592576.04
Salvatore Rinzivillo667344.49
Roberto Trasarti771045.82