Trajectory outlier detection approach based on common slices sub-sequence

Trajectory outlier detection is one of the most popular trajectory data mining topics. It helps researchers obtain a lot of valuable information that can be used as important guidance in monitoring and forecasting. Existing methods have difficulty in detecting the outlying trajectories with continuous multi-segment exception. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose a novel trajectory outlier detection algorithm based on common slices sub-sequence (TODCSS). For each trajectory, the direction-code sequence is firstly calculated based on the direction of each trajectory segment. Secondly, the corresponding sequence consisting of trajectory slices is obtained by inflection point segmentation. And then, the common slices sub-sequences between two trajectories are found to measure their distance. Finally, the slice outliers and trajectory outliers are detected based on the new CSS distance calculation. Both the intuitive visualization presentation and the experimental results on real Atlantic hurricane dataset, real-life mobility trajectory dataset of taxis in San Francisco and synthetic labeled dataset show that the proposed TODCSS algorithm effectively detects slice and trajectory outliers, and improves accuracy and stability in trajectory outlier detection.