A novel trajectory similarity measurement method based on node‐sequence hierarchical digraph

Abstract Trajectory similarity measurement is a basic and vital task in trajectory data mining, which has attracted extensive research in the past decades. Recent works focused on the sequence and hierarchy property of trajectories to construct similarity measurements. However, these methods ignore the user information on the visiting locations, such as semantic and time distribution. In light of this, a novel trajectory similarity measurement based on Node‐Sequence Hierarchical Digraph (NSHD) framework is proposed in this article. We first propose a Time‐Weighted Stay Point Detection (TWSPD) method to extract real visiting locations of users more accurately. Then, the nodes of digraph are obtained by clustering users' stay points and the edges of digraph are sequence information that users move between these nodes. An Advanced Earth Mover's Distance (AEMD) is proposed to measure the node similarity between users, considering visiting time distribution and semantic information simultaneously. Both node and sequence similarities are used to calculate the similarity score to obtain the final trajectory similarity measurement. Experiments on Geolife and T‐Drive datasets show that our proposed method offers competitive performance with mean reciprocal rank values reaching 96.01 and 81.26%, which outperforms related trajectory similarity measurements by more than 10 and 15%.