Inferring Accurate Bus Trajectories from Noisy Estimated Arrival Time Records

Abstract: Urban commuting data has long been a vital source of understanding population mobility behaviour and has been widely adopted for various applications such as transport infrastructure planning and urban anomaly detection. While individual-specific transaction records (such as smart card (tap-in, tap-out) data or taxi trip records) hold a wealth of information, these are often private data available only to the service provider (e.g., taxicab operator). In this work, we explore the utility in harnessing publicly available, albeit noisy, transportation datasets, such as noisy "Estimated Time of Arrival" (ETA) records (commonly available to commuters through transit Apps or electronic signages). We first propose a framework to extract accurate individual bus trajectories from such ETA records, and present results from both a primary city (Singapore) and a secondary city (London) to validate the techniques. Finally, we quantify the upper bound on the spatiotemporal resolution, of the reconstructed trajectory outputs, achieved by our proposed technique.