Travel Mode Identification for Non-Uniform Passive Mobile Phone Data

The collection of individual GPS data, as a substitute for traditional travel surveys, is hindered by low response rates and high costs. Meanwhile, passive mobile phone data, such as Location-Based Service (LBS) data, has high user penetration but remains unexplored for travel behavior analysis. The irregular frequency of data collection results in distorted features and non-uniformly distributed information of trajectories in the Travel Mode Identification (TMI) task. The diversity of trajectories also poses challenges for TMI models. To fill the gap, we propose a TMI framework named Trajectory-as-a-Sequence for Non-uniform data (TaaSN). Specifically, we incorporate GIS features to address the sparsity of motion features. Then, we design a model structure that accounts for time gaps, capturing non-uniform information of trajectory due to irregular frequency. To further enhance model’s generalizability to diverse trajectory data, we propose a trajectory point dropout training strategy. The experimental results demonstrate that the TaaSN framework can greatly exploit the potential of LBS data in travel behavior mining. The proposed model achieves high accuracy on both non-uniform and uniform trajectories. On pseudo-LBS data, the accuracy reaches 84.9% when applied to the trajectories of existing travelers, and achieves 83.5% when applied to the trajectories of new travelers. On uniform data, it reaches 86.8% and 85.4%, respectively. Furthermore, we carry out comprehensive experiments and conclude valuable insights for future TMI framework design.