Mining GPS data to determine interesting locations

Abstract

It is possible to obtain fine grained location information fairly easily using Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled devices. It becomes easy to track an individual's location and trace her trajectory using such devices. By aggregating this data and analyzing multiple users' trajectory a lot of useful information can be extracted. In this paper, we aim to analyze aggregate GPS information of multiple users to mine a list of interesting locations and rank them. By interesting locations we mean the geographical locations visited by several users. It can be an office, university, historical place, a good restaurant, a shopping complex, a stadium, etc. To achieve this various relational algebra operations and statistical operations are applied on the GPS trajectory data of multiple users. The end result is a ranked list of interesting locations. We show the results of applying our methods on a large real life GPS dataset of sixty two users collected over a period of two years. Copyright © 2011 ACM.