GLTC: A Metro Passenger Identification Method Across AFC Data and Sparse WiFi Data

In this paper, we investigate an efficient way for identifying passengers in a metro system across two heterogeneous but complementary trajectory data sources: AFC data recording two points per trip about when and where a passenger enters or leaves the metro system, and WiFi data recording a few points passed by a passenger in the way of some of his/her trips. The identification result can help us to complete individuals’ mobility, and benefits to lots of services, e.g., individual route choice analysis, epidemic case detecting and so on. The problem is similar to calculate the similarity between two trajectories from two data sources, where a trajectory refers to a sequence of points where a passenger appeared in a metro system on observed days. However, due to the small location space in a metro network, large number of passengers with similar travel pattern, and so on, there are lots of trip overlaps or point co-occurrences between different passengers. That results in a large number of passengers mismatched by existing trajectory similarity measurement. To address the problem, this paper proposes a novel global-local correlation based trajectory similarity measurement GLTC. Specifically, GLTC first extracts all overlapping trip pairs of two trajectories by considering the spatiotemporal inclusions from global level. Then it gets the similarity by aggregating each overlapping trip pair’s local similarity, which is calculated by considering some data-driven insights helpful to uniquely identify a passenger (e.g., uneven passenger flow distribution in different cross-sections of a metro network, the number of trips in same travel pattern of a trajectory, and so on). We evaluate GLTC based on real-world data, and the experimental result shows that GLTC outperforms other baselines.