The wide adoption of location-enabled devices, together with the acceptance of services that leverage (personal) data as payment, allows scientists to push through some of the previous barriers imposed by data insufficiency and privacy skepticism. The research problems whose study require hard-to-obtain data (e.g., transportation mode detection, service contextualization, etc.) have now become more accessible to scientists because of the availability of data collecting outlets. One such problem is the detection of a user's transportation mode. Different fields have approached the problem of transportation mode detection with different aims: Location Based Services is a field that focuses on understanding the transportation mode in real-time, Transportation Science is a field that focuses on measuring the daily travel patterns of individuals or groups of individuals, and Human Geography is a field that focuses on enriching a trajectory by adding domain-specific semantics. While different fields providing solutions to the same problem could be viewed as a positive outcome, it is difficult to compare these solutions because the reported performance indicators depend on the type of approach and its aim (e.g., the real-time availability of Location Based Services requires the performance to be computed on each classified location). The contributions of this paper are three fold. First, the paper reviews the critical aspects that are desired by each field of research when providing solutions to the transportation mode detection problem. Second, it proposes three dimensions that separate three branches of science based on their main interest. Finally, it identifies important gaps in research and future directions,i.e., proposing: widely accepted error measures meaningful for all disciplines, methods robust to new datasets and a benchmark dataset for performance validation.

Rooted in the phylosophy of point-and segment-based approaches for transportation mode segmentation of trajectories, the measures that researchers have adoped to evaluate the quality of the results (1) are incomparable across approaches, hence slowing the progress in the field, and (2) do not provide insight about the quality of the continuous transportation mode segmentation. To address these problems, this paper proposes new error measures that can be applied to measure how well a continuous transportation mode segmentation model performs. The error measures introduced are based on aligning multiple inferred continuous intervals to ground truth intervals, and measure the cardinality of the alignment and the spatial and temporal discrepancy between the corresponding aligned segments. The utility of this new way of computing errors is shown by evaluating the segmentation of three generic transportation mode segmentation approaches (implicit, explicit-holistic and explicit-consensus-based transport mode segmentation), which can be implemented in a thick client architecture. Empirical evaluations on a large real-word dataset reveal the superiority of explicit-consensus-based transport mode segmentation, which can be attributed to the explicit modeling of segments and transitions that allows for a meaningful decomposition of the complex learning task.

Despite the availability of mobile positioning technologies and scientists' interests in tracking, modelling and predicting the movements of individuals and populations, these technologies are seldom efficiently used. The continuous changes in mobile positioning and other sensor technologies overburden scientists who are interested in data collection with the task of developing, implementing and testing tracking algorithms and their efficiency in terms of battery consumption. To this extent, this article proposes an adaptive, battery conscious tracking algorithm that collects trajectory data fused with accelerometer data and presents Mobility Collector, which is a prototype platform that, using the tracking algorithm, can produce highly configurable, off-the-shelf, multi-user tracking systems suitable for research purposes. The applicability of the tracking system is tested within the transport science domain by collecting labelled movement traces and related motion data, i.e. accelerometer data and derived information (number of steps and other useful movement features based on temporal aggregates of the raw readings) to develop and evaluate a method that automatically classifies the transportation mode of users with a 90.8% prediction accuracy.

QC 20150312

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