Transportation mode identification with GPS trajectory data and GIS information

Global Positioning System (GPS) trajectory data can be used to infer transportation modes at certain times and locations. Such data have important applications in many transportation research fields, for instance, to detect the movement mode of travelers, calculate traffic flow in an area, and predict the traffic flow at a certain time in the future. In this paper, we propose a novel method to infer transportation modes from GPS trajectory data and Geographic Information System (GIS) information. This method is based on feature extraction and machine learning classification algorithms. While using GIS information to improve inference accuracy, we ensure that the algorithm is simple and easy to use on mobile devices. Applied to GeoLife GPS trajectory dataset, our method achieves 91.1% accuracy while inferring transportation modes, such as walking, bike, bus, car, and subway, with random forest classification algorithm. GIS features in our method improved the overall accuracy by 2.5% while raising the recall of the bus and subway transportation mode categories by 3.4% and 18.5%. We believe that many algorithms used in detecting the transportation modes from GPS trajectory data that do not utilize GIS information can improve their inference accuracy by using our GIS features, with a slight increase in the consumption of data storage and computing resources.