Smart recommendation by mining large-scale GPS traces

Recommending good driving paths is valuable to taxi drivers for reducing unnecessary waste in fuel and increasing revenue. Driving only according to personal experience may lead to poor performance. With the availability of large-scale GPS traces collected from urban taxis, we have the curiosity about whether we can discover the hidden knowledge in the trace data for smart driving recommendation. This paper focuses on developing a smart recommender system based on mining large-scale GPS trace datasets from a large number of urban taxis. However, such the trace datasets are in nature complex, large-scale, and dynamic, which makes mining the datasets particularly challenging. We first extract vehicular mobility pattern from the large-scale GPS trace datasets. Then, the optimal driving process is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Solving the MDP problem results in the optimal driving strategy that gives smart recommendation for taxi drivers. In essence, the most rewarding driving paths can be derived in the long run. We have conducted extensive trace driven simulations and conclusive results show that our recommendation algorithm can successfully find good driving paths and outperforms other alternative algorithms.