Recurrent Neural Networks for Online Travel Mode Detection

Intelligent Transportation System's main objective is to provide sustainable and optimized means of transportation for citizens of urban centers. Identifying the travel modes used by citizens, in real-time, allows these systems to better adapt transportation infrastructure and services according to user needs and possibilities of interaction. Many works have explored the use of machine learning algorithms and ensemble methods, combined with general and domain specific feature extraction techniques, for this task. More recently, several works evaluated the use of deep learning algorithms while none of them has explored the use of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in conjunction with domain feature extraction to enable the development of flexible and lightweight travel mode detection solutions based on multiple smartphone sensor readings. In this paper, we propose a deep RNN architecture for building online travel mode detection models using Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) cells and evaluate its performance using real mobility data collected with a wide variety of sensors. The experiments show that the proposed architecture allows the generation of models with high accuracy and lower memory consumption and computation cost than state-of-the-art supervised machine learning (ML) approaches.