Geospatial Trip Data Generation Using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract: Development of deep learning methods is dependent majorly on availability of large amounts of high quality data. To tackle the problem of data scarcity one of the workarounds is to generate synthetic data using deep learning methods. Especially, when dealing with trajectory data there are added challenges that come in to the picture such as high dependencies of the spatial and temporal component, geographical context sensitivity, privacy laws that protect an individual from being traced back to them based on their mobility patterns etc. This project is an attempt to overcome these challenges by exploring the capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate synthetic trajectories which have characteristics close to the original trajectories. A naive model is designed as a baseline in comparison with a Long Short Term Memorys (LSTMs) based GAN. GANs are generally associated with image data and that is why Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based GANs are very popular in recent studies. However, in this project an LSTM-based GAN was chosen to work with in order to explore its capabilities and strength of handling long-term dependencies sequential data well. The methods are evaluated using qualitative metrics of visually inspecting the trajectories on a real-world map as well as quantitative metrics by calculating the statistical distance between the underlying data distributions of the original and synthetic trajectories. Results indicate that the baseline method implemented performed better than the GAN model. The baseline model generated trajectories that had feasible spatial and temporal components, whereas the GAN model was able to learn the spatial component of the data well and not the temporal component. Conditional map information could be added as part of training the networks and this can be a research question for future work.