DynMDL: A Parallel Trajectory Segmentation Algorithm

The purpose of trajectory segmentation algorithms is to replace an input trajectory by a sub-trajectory with fewer points than the input, but that is also a good approximation to the original trajectory. As such, trajectory segmentation is an essential pre-processing step for trajectory mining algorithms, such as clustering. Among the segmentation strategies that are commonly used for trajectory clustering is Minimum Description Length (MDL)-based segmentation, which consists in finding a sub-trajectory such that the sum of its distance to the input trajectory and its overall length is minimum. However, there are no efficient algorithms for optimal MDL-based segmentation; there are only approximate algorithms. In this work we fill this gap by proposing a parallel multicore algorithm for MDL-based trajectory segmentation. We use three real-life datasets to show that our algorithm achieves optimal MDL, and compare its performance against Traclus, the state-of-the-art approximate Description Length (DL) segmentation algorithm.