Predicting Future Locations of Moving Objects by Recurrent Mixture Density Network

Abstract

Accurate and timely location prediction of moving objects is crucial for intelligent transportation systems and traffic management. In recent years, ubiquitous location acquisition technologies have provided the opportunity for mining knowledge from trajectories, making location prediction and real-time decisions more feasible. Previous location prediction methods have mostly developed on the basis of shallow models whereas shallow models are not competent for some tricky challenges such as multi-time-step location coordinates prediction. Motivated by the current study status, we are dedicated to a deep-learning-based approach to predict the coordinates of several future locations of moving objects based on recent trajectory records. The method of this work consists of three successive parts: trajectory preprocessing, prediction model construction, and post-processing. In this work, a prediction model named the bidirectional recurrent mixture density network (BiRMDN) was constructed by integrating the long short-term memory (LSTM) and mixture density network (MDN) together. This model has the ability to learn long-term contextual information from recent trajectory and model real-valued location coordinates. We employed a vessel trajectory dataset for the implementation of this approach and determined the optimal model configuration after several parameter analysis experiments. Experimental results involving a performance comparison with other widely used methods demonstrate the superiority of the BiRMDN model.