SegTraj: A Segmented-Trajectory-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Social Group Detection

Social group detection aims to identify groups of individuals exhibiting social behavior from multi-individual trajectory data. Recent approaches often determine group correlations based on global trajectory similarity, while temporal dynamics can cause diverging member trajectories and undermine similarity-based measures. Other methods model pairwise interaction strengths to capture group relations, focusing only on explicit direct interactions while ignoring implicit indirect interactions. To address temporal variability of group structures, we decompose long trajectories into multiple semantic sub-trajectories, enabling the capture of dynamic characteristics. Furthermore, to explore implicit indirect interactions, we introduce a unified spatio-temporal graph structure that models both direct and indirect interactions among individuals. In addition, considering the contextual influence of the neighborhood of an individual, we incorporate neighborhood information into the trajectory representation process. Based on these insights, we propose a Segmented-Trajectory-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (SegTraj). This framework uniformly models explicit and implicit interactions through a spatio-temporal graph, and fuses individual trajectories with contextual neighborhood information for fine-grained representation of group relationships. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering both synthetic and real-world scenarios demonstrate that SegTraj significantly outperforms baseline methods. The code is available at https://github.com/DC0827/SegTraj.