Mining motif periodic frequent travel patterns of individual metro passengers considering uncertain disturbances

Periodic pattern mining is of great significance for understanding passenger travel behavior, but the previous works mainly focused on the trajectory data and the dimension of the spot/point. Besides, many uncertain factors (severe weather, traffic accident, etc.) may interfere with discovering original and accurate periodic travel patterns. This paper proposes a novel type of travel pattern called motif periodic frequent pattern (MPFP), which can capture the periodicity of network temporal motifs of individual metro passengers with higher-order spatio-temporal characteristics considering uncertain disturbances. We also propose a new complete mining algorithm MPFP-Growth to extract MPFP from smart card data, and the real long-time-span experimental data from a large-scale metro system is applied. Results show that frequent-travel metro passengers usually have some typical MPFPs with the temporal periodic characteristic of “week”. Only the top 10 types of all 4,624 types account for about 95% of all motifs and the top 5 types constitute about 90%, and the MPFP of the top 3 types of motifs account for nearly 80% of all periodic patterns, in which Mono-MPFP and 2-MPFP are the main ones. The relatively stable time range of MPFP is three months, and the threshold for the optimal uncertain disturbance factor should be set at 5%. Additionally, several interesting typical MPFP of individual metro commuting passengers and their proportions are introduced to further understand the multifarious variants of MPFP. © 2023 Tongji University and Tongji University Press. Publishing Services by Elsevier B.V.