Map matching is a technique used to identify which path a vehicle is travelling on in a road map. Since it is a crucial fundamental step for a wide range of transportation applications, many map-matching algorithms have been devised ranging from simple geometric calculation methods to more sophisticated methods. However, the study of spatial relationship patterns between GPS coordinates and road segments mapped with map-matching has not received enough attention from researchers. This paper presents a framework, called Proxy Map Matching (PMM), to learn such patterns using machine learning techniques. However, we find that solely employing machine learning techniques on such data is not sufficient to capture the patterns. Solving this problem that way results in an inaccurate proxy model. In PMM, we construct several proxy map matchers and assign them to each group of data based on their spatial proximity, thereby achieving accuracy improvement. An experiment on real-world data shows that the framework achieves above 85% accuracy with integration of machine learning techniques, and outperforms the methods which solely employ machine learning techniques significantly. Moreover, the proposed proxy model can perform very fast matching. For 14,177 GPS coordinate pairs per second, we achieve 88.4% accuracy.
Keywords
Map-matching, Machine Learning, Spatial Database
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