Abstract Predictive analytics over mobility data is of great importance since it can assist an analyst to predict events, such as collisions, encounters, traffic jams, etc. A typical example is anticipated location prediction, where the goal is to predict the future location of a moving object, given a look-ahead time. What is even more challenging is to be able to accurately predict collective behavioural patterns of movement, such as co-movement patterns as well as their course over time. In this paper, we address the problem of Online Prediction of Co-movement Patterns. Furthermore, in order to be able to calculate the accuracy of our solution, we propose a co-movement pattern similarity measure, which facilitates the comparison between the predicted clusters and the actual ones. Finally, we calculate the clusters’ evolution through time (survive, split, etc.) and compare the cluster evolution predicted by our framework with the actual one. Our experimental study uses two real-world mobility datasets from the maritime and urban domain, respectively, and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Recent approaches have proven the effectiveness of local outlier factor-based outlier detection when applied over traffic flow probability distributions. However, these approaches used distance metrics based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient when calculating probability distribution similarity. Consequently, the limited expressiveness of the Bhattacharyya coefficient restricted the accuracy of the methods. The crucial deficiency of the Bhattacharyya distance metric is its inability to compare distributions with non-overlapping sample spaces over the domain of natural numbers. Traffic flow intensity varies greatly, which results in numerous non-overlapping sample spaces, rendering metrics based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient inappropriate. In this work, we address this issue by exploring alternative distance metrics and showing their applicability in a massive real-life traffic flow data set from 26 vital intersections in The Hague. The results on these data collected from 272 sensors for more than two years show various advantages of the Earth Mover's distance both in effectiveness and efficiency.

Spatial-keyword queries are important for a wide range of applications that retrieve data based on a combination of keyword search and spatial constraints. However, efficient processing of spatial-keyword queries is not a trivial task because the combination of textual and spatial data results in a high-dimensional representation that is challenging to index effectively. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel indexing scheme for efficient support of spatial-keyword range queries. At the heart of our approach lies a carefully-designed mapping of spatio-textual data to a two-dimensional (2D) space that produces compact partitions of spatio-textual data. In turn, the mapped 2D data can be indexed effectively by traditional spatial data structures, such as an R-tree. We propose bounds, theoretically proven for correctness, that lead to the design of a filter-and-refine algorithm that prunes the search space effectively. In this way, our approach for spatial-keyword range queries is readily applicable to any database system that provides spatial support. In our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate how our algorithm can be implemented over PostgreSQL and exploit its underlying spatial index provided by PostGIS, in order to process spatial-keyword range queries efficiently. Moreover, we show that our solution outperforms different competitor approaches.

Trajectory clustering is a significant knowledge discovery operation. Especially nowadays, the need for performing advanced analytic operations over massively produced data, such as mobility traces, in efficient and scalable ways is imperative. In this thesis, initially, we address the problem of in-DBMS subtrajectory clustering and in-DBMS incremental and progressive cluster analysis. However, performing such an operation over immense volumes of data in a centralized way is far from straightforward, which calls for parallel and distributed algorithms. Subsequently, after recognizing that the bottleneck of such operations is the underlying trajectory join query, we address the Distributed Subtrajectory Join query by utilizing the MapReduce programming model. Finally, this query is utilized in order to tackle the problem of Distributed Subtrajectory Clustering in an efficient and scalable way.

The i4sea research project provides effective and efficient big data integration, processing and analysis technologies to deliver both real-time and historical operational snapshots of fishing vessels activity in national sea areas. This paper presents the architecture of the i4sea big data platform for sea area monitoring and analysis of fishing vessels activity and demonstrates the operation of some use-case pilot scenarios.

Trajectory clustering is an important operation of knowledge discovery from mobility data. Especially nowadays, the need for performing advanced analytic operations over massively produced data, such as mobility traces, in efficient and scalable ways is imperative. However, discovering clusters of complete trajectories can overlook significant patterns that exist only for a small portion of their lifespan. In this paper, we address the problem of Distributed Subtrajectory Clustering in an efficient and highly scalable way. The problem is challenging because the subtrajectories to be clustered are not known in advance, but they need to be discovered dynamically based on adjacent subtrajectories in space and time. Towards this objective, we split the original problem to three sub-problems, namely Subtrajectory Join, Trajectory Segmentation and Clustering and Outlier Detection, and deal with each one in a distributed fashion by utilizing the MapReduce programming model. The efficiency and the effectiveness of our solution is demonstrated experimentally over a synthetic and two large real datasets from the maritime and urban domains and through comparison with two state of the art subtrajectory clustering algorithms.

We present a big data framework for the prediction of streaming trajectory data, enriched from other data sources and exploiting mined patterns of trajectories, allowing accurate long-term predictions with low latency. To meet this goal, we follow a multi-step methodology. First, we efficiently compress surveillance data in an online fashion, by constructing trajectory synopses that are spatio-temporally linked with streaming and archival data from a variety of diverse and heterogeneous data sources. The enriched stream of trajectory synopses is stored in a distributed RDF store, supporting data exploration via SPARQL queries. The enriched stream of synopses along with the raw data is consumed by trajectory prediction algorithms that exploit mined patterns from the RDF store, namely medoids of (sub-) trajectory clusters, which prolong the horizon of useful predictions. The framework is extended with offline and online interactive visual analytics tool to facilitate real world analysis in the maritime and the aviation domains.

In this paper, we present an efficient in-DBMS framework for progressive time-aware sub-trajectory cluster analysis. In particular, we address two variants of the problem: (a) spatiotemporal sub-trajectory clustering and (b) index-based time-aware clustering at querying environment. Our approach for (a) relies on a two-phase process: a voting-and-segmentation phase followed by a sampling-and-clustering phase. Regarding (b), we organize data into partitions that correspond to groups of sub-trajectories, which are incrementally maintained in a hierarchical structure. Both approaches have been implemented in Hermes@PostgreSQL, a real Moving Object Database engine built on top of PostgreSQL, enabling users to perform progressive cluster analysis via simple SQL. The framework is also extended with a Visual Analytics (VA) tool to facilitate real world analysis.

In this paper, we propose an efficient in-DBMS solution for the problem of sub-trajectory clustering and outlier detection in large moving object datasets. The method relies on a two-phase process: a voting-and-segmentation phase that segments trajectories according to a local density criterion and trajectory similarity criteria, followed by a sampling-and-clustering phase that selects the most representative sub-trajectories to be used as seeds for the clustering process. Our proposal, called S 2 T-Clustering (for Sampling-based Sub-Trajectory Clustering) is novel since it is the first, to our knowledge, that addresses the pure spatiotemporal sub-trajectory clustering and outlier detection problem in a real-world setting (by ‘pure’ we mean that the entire spatiotemporal information of trajectories is taken into consideration). Moreover, our proposal can be efficiently registered as a database query operator in the context of extensible DBMS (namely, PostgreSQL in our current implementation). The effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed algorithm are experimentally validated over synthetic and real-world trajectory datasets, demonstrating that S 2 T-Clustering outperforms an off-the-shelf in-DBMS solution using PostGIS by several orders of magnitude.