An Improved Fuzzy Trajectory Clustering Method for Exploring Urban Travel Patterns

Exploring urban travel patterns can analyze the mobility regularity of residents to provide guidance for urban traffic planning and emergency decision. Clustering methods have been widely applied to explore the hidden information from large-scale trajectory data on travel patterns exploring. How to implement soft constraints in the clustering method and evaluate the effectiveness quantitatively is still a challenge. In this study, we propose an improved trajectory clustering method based on fuzzy density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (TC-FDBSCAN) to conduct classification on trajectory data. Firstly, we define the trajectory distance which considers the influence of different attributes and determines the corresponding weight coefficients to measure the similarity among trajectories. Secondly, membership degrees and membership functions are designed in the fuzzy clustering method as the extension of the classical DBSCAN method. Finally, trajectory data collected in Shenzhen city, China, are divided into two types (workdays and weekends) and then implemented in the experiment to explore different travel patterns. Moreover, three indices including Silhouette Coefficient, Davies–Bouldin index, and Calinski–Harabasz index are used to evaluate the effectiveness among the proposed method and other traditional clustering methods. The results also demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method.