Unsupervised Competitive Learning Clustering and Visual Method to Obtain Accurate Trajectories From Noisy Repetitive GPS Data

To make the proper planning of bus public transportation systems, especially with the introduction of electric buses to the fleets, it is essential to characterize the routes, patterns of traffic, speed, constraints, and presence of high slopes. Currently, GPS (Global Position System) is available worldwide in the fleet. However, they often produce datasets of poor quality, with low data rates, loss of information, noisy samples, and eventual paths not belonging to regular bus routes. Therefore, extracting useful information from these poor data is a challenging task. The current paper proposes a novel method based on an unsupervised competitive density clustering algorithm to obtain hot spot clusters of any density. The clusters are a result of their competition for the GPS samples. Each cluster attracts GPS samples until a maximum radius from its centroid and thereafter moves toward the most density areas. The winning clusters are sorted using a novel distance metric with the support of a visual interface, forming a sequence of points that outline the bus trajectory. Finally, indicators are correlated to the clusters making a trajectory characterization and allowing extensive assessments. According to the actual case studies, the method performs well with noisy GPS samples and the loss of information. The proposed method presents quite a fixed parameter, allowing fair performance for most GPS datasets without needing custom adjustments. It also proposes a framework for preparing the input GPS dataset, clustering, sorting the clusters to outline the trajectory, and making the trajectory characterization.