Effectively grouping trajectory streams

Trajectory data streams are huge amounts of data pertaining to time and position of moving objects. They are continuously generated by different sources exploiting a wide variety of technologies (e.g., RFID tags, GPS, GSM networks). Mining such amount of data is a challenging problem, since the possibility to extract useful information from this peculiar kind of data is crucial in many application scenarios such as vehicle traffic management, hand-off in cellular networks, supply chain management. Moreover, spatial data streams pose interesting challenges for their proper representation, thus making the mining process harder than for classical point data. In this paper, we address the problem of trajectory data streams clustering, that revealed really intriguing as we deal with a kind of data (trajectories) for which the order of elements is relevant. We propose a complete framework starting from data preparation task that allows us to make the mining step quite effective. Since the validation of data mining approaches has to be experimental we performed several tests on real world datasets that confirmed the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed technique. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.