TSMini: A Simple Yet Highly Effective Trajectory Similarity Learning Model

Abstract

Trajectory similarity is fundamental to many spatio-temporal data mining applications. Recent studies propose deep learning models to approximate conventional trajectory similarity measures, exploiting their fast inference time once trained. Although efficient inference has been reported, challenges remain in similarity approximation accuracy due to difficulties in trajectory granularity modeling and in exploiting similarity signals in training data. To fill this gap, we propose TSMini, a highly effective trajectory similarity model with a sub-view modeling mechanism and a k nearest neighbor-based loss. The former enables learning multi-granularity trajectory patterns, while the latter guides TSMini to learn not only absolute similarity values between trajectories but also their relative similarity ranks. Together, these innovations enable highly accurate trajectory similarity approximation. Experiments show that TSMini outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 15% on average when learning widely used trajectory similarity measures.