A deep semi-supervised machine learning algorithm for detecting transportation modes based on GPS tracking data

Transportation research has benefited from GPS tracking devices since a higher volume of data can be acquired. Trip information such as travel speed, time, and most visited locations can be easily extracted from raw GPS tracking data. However, transportation modes cannot be extracted directly and require more complex analytical processes. Common approaches for detecting travel modes heavily depend on manual labelling of trajectories with accurate trip information, which is inefficient in many aspects. This paper proposes a method of semi-supervised machine learning by using minimal labelled data. The method can accept GPS trajectory with adjustable length and extract latent information with long short-term memory (LSTM) Autoencoder. The method adopts a deep neural network architecture with three hidden layers to map the latent information to detect transportation mode. The proposed method is assessed by applying it to the case study where an accuracy of 93.94% can be achieved, which significantly outperforms similar studies.