Analysis and Visualization for Hot Spot Based Route Recommendation Using Short-Dated Taxi GPS Traces

Taxi GPS traces, which contain a great deal of valuable information as regards to human mobility and city traffic, can be extracted to improve the quality of our lives. Since the method of visualized analysis is believed to be an effective way to present information vividly, we develop our analysis and visualization method based on a city’s short-dated taxi GPS traces, which can provide recommendation to help cruising taxi drivers to find potential passengers with optimal routes. With our approach, hot spots for loading and unloading passenger(s) are extracted using an improved DBSCAN algorithm after data preprocessing including cleaning and filtering. Then, this paper describes the start-end point-based similar trajectory method to get coarse-level trajectories clusters, together with the density-based e distance trajectory clustering algorithm to identify recommended potential routes. A weighted tree is defined including such factors as driving time, velocity, distance and endpoint attractiveness for optimal route evaluation from vacant to occupied hot spots. An example is presented to show the effectiveness of our visualization method.