A Lightweight Framework for Fast Trajectory Simplification

The ubiquitous GPS sensors collect massive trajectory data from moving objects, which is useful in data mining applications. However, trajectory data is enormous in volume, and thus, directly storing and processing the raw data is expensive. Using trajectory simplification, a trajectory can be reduced to a set of continuous line segments with acceptable data loss, which is an efficient method. Although many algorithms are proposed, they still suffer from the following issues including (i) non-data driven capability as most studies rely on human-crafted rules or pre-defined parameters, (ii) bound with error measures that yield high computational cost, and (iii) focusing only on the local information preservation in trajectories, but failing in capturing the global mobility patterns for trajectory compression.To address the above issues, we propose a Seq2Seq2Seq framework, abbreviated S3, which consists of two chained Seq2Seq. With differentiable reconstruction learning, S3 enables self-supervised trajectory simplification in a lightweight manner. Besides, we deploy S3 over the graph neural architecture to capture the context-aware mobility patterns and enhance the representation paradigm of trajectories with geographical semantics, where a context-aware distance measure is designed for quality evaluation. An online extension of S3 is also developed to enable streaming trajectory simplifications. Finally, extensive experiments using two real-world datasets in both offline and online scenarios show that S3 achieves much higher efficiency (e.g., it achieves up to one order of magnitude speed-up gains) and comparable compression quality, compared with both non-learning and state-of-the-art learning-based methods.