A Sequential Pattern Mining Based Approach to Adaptively Detect Anomalous Paths in Floating Vehicle Trajectories

The detection of anomalous paths from floating vehicle trajectories plays an increasingly important role in dynamic path planning because of its ability to identify fraudulent transport behaviors, unexpected traffic accidents, and traffic restriction areas. Existing studies mostly emphasize the significant deviations based on global shape metrics and cannot manage trajectories with missing segments. To address these problems, this study proposes a new sequential pattern mining based method for detecting anomalous paths (SPDAP) in floating vehicle trajectories. First, discrete trajectory points were transformed into consecutive road segment sequences using map matching and essential empirical information. Focusing on these segment sequences, this method constructs a directed graph and calculates the conditional occurrence probabilities of multi-order sub-paths on the graph. On this basis, we designed a sequential pattern mining algorithm by estimating kernel density distributions to adaptively extract multi-order frequent sub-paths. Finally, these anomalous paths can be identified by matching the operations with frequent paths. Comparative experiments on simulated trajectories demonstrated that SPDAP could accurately, adequately, and adaptively detect anomalous paths. Additionally, using real-life taxi trajectories, we conducted semantic analysis by considering travel time and charges to further derive four patterns from the detected anomalous paths. These patterns are expected to support the identification of fraudulent taxi trips and the discovery of candidate driving routes with a preference for saving time or charge. In the future, we will focus on tracing the intrinsic causes of anomalous paths by introducing multisource information and performing real-time anomalous path detection using adaptive time intervals.