Ship trajectory prediction based on machine learning and deep learning: A systematic review and methods analysis

Ship trajectory prediction based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) data has attracted increasing interest as it helps prevent collision accidents and eliminate potential navigational conflicts. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to conduct a systematic analysis of all the prediction methods to help reveal their advantages to ensure safety at sea in different scenarios. It is particularly important and significant within the context of unmanned ships forming a new hybrid maritime traffic together with manned ships in the future. This paper aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the up-to-date ship trajectory prediction algorithms based on machine learning and deep learning methods. To do so, five classical machine learning methods (i.e., Kalman Filter, Gaussian Process Regression, Support Vector Regression, Random Forest, and Back Propagation Network) and eight deep learning methods (i.e., Recurrent Neural Networks, Long Short-Term Memory, Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory, Gate Recurrent Unit, Bi-directional Gate Recurrent Unit, Sequence to Sequence, Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network, and Transformer) are thoroughly analysed and compared from the algorithm essence and applications to excavate their features and adaptability for manned and unmanned ships. The findings reveal the characteristics of various prediction methods and provide valuable implications for different stakeholders to guide the best-fit choice of a particular method as the solution under a specific circumstance. It also makes contributions to the extraction of the research difficulties of ship trajectory prediction and the corresponding solutions that are put forward to guide the development of future research.