TTDM: A Travel Time Difference Model for Next Location Prediction

Next location prediction is of great importance for many location-based applications and provides essential intelligence to business and governments. In existing studies, a common approach to next location prediction is to learn the sequential transitions with massive historical trajectories based on conditional probability. Unfortunately, due to the time and space complexity, these methods (e.g., Markov models) only use the just passed locations to predict next locations, without considering all the passed locations in the trajectory. In this paper, we seek to enhance the prediction performance by considering the travel time from all the passed locations in the query trajectory to a candidate next location. In particular, we propose a novel method, called Travel Time Difference Model (TTDM), which exploits the difference between the shortest travel time and the actual travel time to predict next locations. Further, we integrate the TTDM with a Markov model via a linear interpolation to yield a joint model, which computes the probability of reaching each possible next location and returns the top-rankings as results. We have conducted extensive experiments on two real datasets: the vehicle passage record (VPR) data and the taxi trajectory data. The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in prediction accuracy over existing solutions. For example, compared with the Markov model, the top-1 accuracy improves by 40% on the VPR data and by 15.6% on the Taxi data.