Spatiotemporal Representation Learning for Driving Behavior Analysis: A Joint Perspective of Peer and Temporal Dependencies

Abstract

Driving is a complex activity that requires multi-level skilled operations (e.g., acceleration, braking, and turning). Analyzing driving behaviors can help us assess driver performances, improve traffic safety, and, ultimately, promote the development of intelligent and resilient transportation systems. While some efforts have been made for analyzing driving behaviors, existing methods can be improved via representation learning by jointly exploring the peer and temporal dependencies of driving behaviors. To that end, in this paper, we develop a Peer and Temporal-Aware Representation Learning based framework (PTARL) for driving behavior analysis with GPS trajectory data. Specifically, we first detect the driving operations and states of each driver from their GPS traces. Then, we derive a sequence of multi-view driving state transition graphs from the driving state sequences, in order to characterize a driver's driving behaviors that vary over time. In addition, we develop a peer and temporal-aware representation learning method to learn a sequence of time-varying yet relational vectorized representations from the driving state transition graphs. The proposed method can simultaneously model both the graph-graph peer dependency and the current-past temporal dependency in a unified optimization framework. Also, we provide two effective solutions for the optimization problem: (i) a joint optimization solution of representation learning and prediction; and (ii) a step-by-step solution of representation learning and prediction. Besides, we explore two strategies to fuse the learned representations from multi-view transition graphs: (i) simple alignment and (ii) collective fusion. Moreover, we apply the developed framework to the two applications of quantitative transportation safety: (i) scoring of driving performances, and (ii) detection of dangerous regions. Finally, we present extensive experimental results with big trajectory data to demonstrate the enhanced performances of the proposed method for quantitative transportation safety.