Exploring Trajectory Prediction Through Machine Learning Methods

Human mobility prediction is of great importance in a wide range of modern applications in different fields such as personalized recommendation systems, the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication systems, and so on. Generally, the prediction goal varies from different application scenarios. For the applications of 5G network including resource allocation and mobility management, it is essential to predict the positions of mobile users in the near future from dozens of seconds to a few minutes so as to make preparation in advance, which is actually a trajectory prediction problem. In this paper, with the particular focus on multi-user multi-step trajectory prediction, we first design a basic deep learning-based prediction framework, where the long short-term memory (LSTM) network is directly applied as the most critical component to learn user-specific mobility pattern from the user's historical trajectories and predict his/her movement trends in the future. Motivated by the related findings after testifying and analyzing this basic framework on a model-based dataset, we extend it to a region-oriented prediction scheme and propose a multi-user multi-step trajectory prediction framework by further incorporating the sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning. The experimental results on a realistic dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework has significant improvements on generalization ability and reduces error-accumulation effect for multi-step prediction.