Mobile user identification based on road networks and multiple distance measures

Mobile user identification aims at matching different mobile devices of the same user using trajectory data, which has attracted extensive research in recent years. Most of the previous work extracted trajectory features based on regular grids, which will lead to incorrect feature representation due to lack of geographic information. Besides, most trajectory similarity models only considered one single distance measure to calculate the similarity between users, which ignore the connection between different distance measures and may lead to some false matches. In light of this, we present a novel user identification method based on road networks and multiple distance measures in this article. The proposed method segments a city map into several grids and road segments based on road networks. Then it extracts location and road information of trajectories to jointly construct user features. Multiple distance measures are fused by a discriminant model to improve the effect of user identification. Experiments on real GPS trajectory datasets show that our proposed method outperforms related similarity measure methods and is stable for mobile user identification. Meanwhile, our method can also achieve good identification results even on sparse trajectory datasets.