Unveiling movement uncertainty for robust trajectory similarity analysis

Trajectory data analysis and mining require distance and similarity measures, and the quality of their results is directly related to those measures. Several similarity measures originally proposed for time-series were adapted to work with trajectory data, but these approaches were developed for well-behaved data that usually do not have the uncertainty and heterogeneity introduced by the sampling process to obtain trajectories. More recently, similarity measures were proposed specifically for trajectory data, but they rely on simplistic movement uncertainty representations, such as linear interpolation. In this article, we propose a new distance function, and a new similarity measure that uses an elliptical representation of trajectories, being more robust to the movement uncertainty caused by the sampling rate and the heterogeneity of this kind of data. Experiments using real data show that our proposal is more accurate and robust than related work.