Spatiotemporal periodical pattern mining in traffic data

The widespread use of road sensors has generated huge amount of traffic data, which can be mined and put to various different uses. Finding frequent trajectories from the road network of a big city helps in summarizing the way the traffic behaves in the city. It can be very useful in city planning and traffic routing mechanisms, and may be used to suggest the best routes given the region, road, time of day, day of week, season, weather, and events etc. Other than the frequent patterns, even the events that are not so frequent, such as those observed when there is heavy snowfall, other extreme weather conditions, long traffic jams, accidents, etc. might actually follow a periodic occurrence, and hence might be useful to mine. This problem of mining the frequent patterns from road traffic data has been addressed in previous works using the context knowledge of the road network of the city. In this paper, we have developed a method to mine spatiotemporal periodic patterns in the traffic data and use these periodic behaviors to summarize the huge road network. The first step is to find periodic patterns from the speed data of individual road sensor stations, and use their periods to represent the station's periodic behavior using probability distribution matrices. Then, we use density-based clustering to cluster the sensors on the road network based on the similarities between their periodic behavior as well as their geographical distance, thus combining similar nodes to form a road network with larger but fewer nodes.